As part of the 24th Biennale of Sydney: ten thousand suns, the Circular Quay Foyer Wall has been transformed by a new commission from Hayv Kahraman, an Iraqi-Swedish-American artist of Kurdish descent. Kahraman’s Bodies of water is the eighth iteration of the MCA’s ongoing Foyer Wall series. In researching Australia’s immigration policy, Kahraman began to draw parallels between water, migration and the processes of Ebru marbling, a traditional Turkish art form which involves painting on water.

Having been an undocumented migrant herself, travelling via air and on foot, Kahraman was struck by the vulnerability of those fleeing to Australia and Europe by sea. Surrounded by such vastness, new possibilities are offered up, yet the risks presented by open waters are profound. It is well documented that sea-crossings result in many migrant fatalities, the unknown bodies of the deceased disappearing into the same waters that might have been their salvation.

In Bodies of water, Kahraman, inspired by a self-generating plankton known as the immortal jellyfish, presents these souls as hybrid plankton-ghost creatures haunting the ocean through Ebru marbling. The unique imprint of marbling resonates with human fingerprints, which the European Union stores in its asylum fingerprint database system to surveil those crossing borders. To avoid being tracked, many asylum seekers have erased their own fingerprints by burning and abrasion.