NEWS
ANNOUNCEMENT 03.06.2026
First Nation’s Artist-in-Resident:
Emma-Lee Maher
This is a unique paid opportunity for an emerging or early career First Nations artist to undertake an 8 week Artist-in-Residency (AIR) at Vessel during our 2026 ‘Vessel Season’. This program is facilitated by Board Director and independent curator Zali Morgan.
“This project starts with a tin of family documents I was given as a kid—material I’ve lived alongside for most of my life. The residency gives me the time and space to come back to that through making, and to let this personal body of work unfold with care into something that can be shared.” - Emma-Lee Maher
This public-facing program provides valuable space, time, and connections for artistic development while engaging the local community. Vessel aims to create a contemporary environment that promotes experimentation and learning through practice, with the residency serving as a hub for development, mentorship, and artistic collaboration.
Thanks to the Fulcrum Fund and the Fremantle Foundation for your generous support for this project. This program couldn’t have been possible without your commitment to supporting First Nations creatives and artists.
ANNOUNCEMENT 07.05.2026
Know Thy Neighbour #4: Cara Teusner-Gartland
A collaboration with SPACED and Fremantle Buffalo Club
Know Thy Neighbour is SPACED’s metro-focused residency program that commissions socially engaged, context-responsive art projects embedded in Perth’s neighbourhoods. The program asks communities and artists alike to step beyond habitual encounters with their surroundings—to explore scenarios that defamiliarise and recontextualise “the local.”
Know Thy Neighbour #4: Gestures asks artists to transmit ideas grounded in physical environments, investigating acts of connection and reciprocity in their projects to uncover relational possibilities and mutual understanding. Gestures can be quiet or bold, habitual or improvised, yet they often carry deep social, cultural and historical weight. Whether physical or intangible, present or absent, explicit or implied, Gestures offer a generative space for artists to respond to the complexity of metropolitan Perth with attentiveness, curiosity, and care; embracing co-creation as a form of exchange, and artistic practice as a way of listening.
The artist that will do their residency at Vessel Contemporary is
Cara Teusner-Gartland
Work In Progress: The project explores Fremantle Buffalo Club, a site known for shared activities and community work, to look at the power of empathy, wellbeing, and connection: a motion in a performance, a charitable act, the muscle memory of billiards stick and dart throwing, and the act of teaching this to a stranger, leaving with a friend. Cara will draw on the Club’s history and interview present members to inform a project that reflects the club’s identity and living history within the broader community of Fremantle.
Project Partners: Vessel Contemporary and Fremantle Buffalo Club
ANNOUNCEMENT 28.04.2026
Between Suns by Khaled Sabsabi.
Curated by Mikala Tai.
Vessel Contemporary is proud to announce Between Suns, a major survey exhibition of work by Khaled Sabsabi, opening 7 August 2026 at the Naval Store in Fremantle. Curated by Mikala Tai, the exhibition brings together works spanning 1998 to 2026, including new and previously unexhibited works, transforming Vessel into an immersive, multi-sensory experience.
This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the community. In the last couple of months you have really shown that Vessel and this kind of program is needed here in WA.
Working across painting, video, sound, installation and performance, Khaled approaches art as a communicative and ethical space: a shared language through which complex ideas of belonging, faith, power and collectively can be encountered. His work frequently draws on mysticism, ritual and everyday gestures, unfolding across cycles rather than fixed narratives, and inviting audiences into moments of reflection, resonance and exchange.
Sabsabi describes the exhibition as ‘an opportunity to further personal artistic and creative expressions of the undefined routines and the ability to distill space, time and symbolism into the narrative of life.’
Between Suns runs concurrently with Sabsabi's representation of Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, offering Western Australian audiences a rare opportunity to engage deeply with an internationally acclaimed artist's practice on a local scale.
Read and download the full media announcement here