Badra Aji’s exhibition No More Dreaming Tonight offers viewers various entry points for reflection on identity, race and the complexities of living as a queer person of colour in so-called Australia. A continuation of his work as a finalist for the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize, No More Dreaming Tonight presents a narrative drawn from Aji’s own lived experience. Through the nineteen mailboxes of the Mailbox Art Space, Aji pulls the viewer into a fragmented narrative over the course of twenty days in 2012, a time during which the artist ‘woke up as a white man.’ During this period, Aji reconciled with notions of identity and belonging in a world that privileges whiteness and heteronormativity. Oscillating between drawing, photographs, found objects and text, the works provide moments of knowing and unknowing, allowing the viewer to consider various histories and piece together storylines that may or may not exist.

Wunderkammer, literally translated from German means ‘wonder chamber’ or ‘room of wonders’. The term refers to cabinets of curiosities, collections of oddities and treasures, even royal collections of jewellery or similarly prized possessions. Which is exactly what Ivana Lilith has transformed Mailbox Art Space into. The nineteen wooden mailboxes are reflective of old school museum display cases: little vitrines to house precious treasures safe behind their glass. On first impression Lilith’s ceramic sculptures, her ‘oddities’, are delicate and feminine, being protected in their display cases. White and pink, with horses, swans, lilies, boobs and feminine curves being the first things you see. But when looking closer, this initial softness subsides - you see the hands ripping to open the chests of their headless figures. These are distorted, stretching, contorted humanoid creatures, some headless, others with devilish horns.