Nikki Lam is an artist-curator and filmmaker based in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia) and Hong Kong.
Working primarily with moving images and text, her work explores memory through contemplation of time, space and impermanence. Nikki is interested in the complexity and multiplicity of migratory expressions: its tensions, fragmentation, poetic threads of personal and collective histories.
Nikki’s work has been shown widely across Australia and internationally, including as part of Primavera: Australian Young Artists 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, Melbourne Now (2023) at National Gallery of Victoria, Only the future revisits the past (2024) at Centre for Contemporary Photography, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Itoshima Art Farm International Arts Festival in Japan and Pier 2 Art Center in Taiwan.
Her recent work the unshakable destiny_2101 has been shortlisted for multiple art prizes across Australia and is awarded Best Audio Visual Project at Jakarta Independent Film Festival. Her writing has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), Liminal and others. In 2023, she was awarded the ACME Residency London by Australia Council for the Arts.
Nikki is drawn to relational modes of practice across her artistic and curatorial work. With a current focus on Asian diasporas, Nikki is co-director of Hyphenated Biennial and Hyphenated Projects, an artist-led network that nurtures practice in Asian diasporas, and the winner of Creative Australia’s Asia Pacific Arts Award for Innovation in 2024.
She co-runs Slow Burn Books, a tiny bookshop that circulates independent art and design publications across Asia-Pacific.
Nikki has been the Artistic Director of Channels video art festival (2014-2017), Curator at The Substation (2019-2023), alongside many hybrid and leadership roles in the arts including programming and production roles at Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (UK). She has also been on the boards of NETS Victoria, Seventh Gallery.
Nikki has a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photomedia (2009, Monash University) and Executive Master of Arts (2014, University of Melbourne). Nikki is a current PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University. Her practice-led PhD is about moving images in Hong Kong Diaspora.
email︎nikki [at] thecuriousother.info
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image by Leah Jing McIntosh, 2023︎Working in Narrm:
我在此承認身處土地以及水域既傳統繼承人，Wurundjeri族丶Boon Wurrung族，以及Kulin Nations 所有族群。原住民悠久和豐富的知識和文化，是此地藝術家創作的空氣和養份。我在此真心感謝原住民以及他們的長輩。
I would like to acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation. I would like to offer my gratitude and respect to the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples, their elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded on this land and colonialisation is ongoing. No settler artists can create without the rich cultures that preceded us which continues to live and flourish on this land. From the river to the sea, always was always will be.
原本是，永遠都是原住民的土地。