ABOUT
ASHA KIANI
Asha Kiani (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist working across theatre, film, visual-art, music, and community arts. Her practice explores identity, displacement and home, and the role of art in personal and collective healing. Asha has created and presented work with The Centre for Stories, Perth Festival, Barefaced Stories, and Saga Sisterhood—a transformative performance project for South Asian women. Her debut piece, Drift (Blue Room Theatre, 600 Seconds, Fringe World Festival, 2020), received a Best Of award. In 2021, she wrote and directed Áváreh وارهٓا & Found (The Blue Room Theatre), tracing the experiences of Iranian-Australians who fled the 1979 revolution and the lives of their children raised in Boorloo (Perth). Iterations of the work featured in a major exhibition at PS Art Space (Fremantle, led by Kiani with the Second Generation Collective) and later at the Denmark Festival of Voice.
Passionate about creative development and community practice, Asha has led children’s programs with Barking Gecko Theatre Company, creative developments with Encounter Theatre, and workshops with Women of Music Production Perth (WOMPP). In 2024, she collaborated with Iranian-Australian video artist Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson on Love Letter to the Nightingale (Blue Room Theatre) and an accompanying VR film (Aesthetic Film Festival VR Lab).
As co-founder and Creative Director of The Second Generation Collective, Asha supports emerging Iranian-Australian and South Asian artists. In 2023, the collective received the inaugural WA Visual Arts and Craft Strategy Major Commission with PICA and Creative Australia for Vádye Eshgh (Valley of Love), premiering in 2025.
KEY COLLABORATORS
SUKHJIT KUAR KHALSA
DIRECTOR, BLUE ROOM THEATRE |www.blueroom.org.au
SECOND GENERATION COLLECTIVE
EMERGING IRANIAN & SOUTH ASIAN AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS | www.secondgenerationcollective.com
SECOND GENERATION COLLECTIVE
The Second Generation Collective explore stories of refugee-ship, migration and identity in Boorloo. Founded by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Asha Kiani in 2020, the artists comprise of migrants who fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and their children who have grown up on Noongar Boojar. The collective explores their experiences of displacement, resettlement, heritage, home, grief, and faith. Against the backdrop of dual identity, they confront the push and pull of cultures in order to uncover the past and embrace the present. By acknowledging communal traumas and bridging intergenerational gaps, their thoughtful multi-disciplinary artforms evoke an empathic lens within the viewer.
Through a lens of authentic curation and communal care, Kiani and Eshraghian-Haakansson created this initiative by engaging with philosophies that ask: how can we live as a complex, unified whole, where differences are embraced, and diversity is celebrated? How do we create a compassionate foundation from which our truths are heard and acknowledged? What does it take to truly understand the process of healing in our communities?
The projects and artworks that emerge from the Collective aim to untangle the fragments of what it means to listen and understand moments of suffering, hardship, hope and faith in the human experience; to embrace the universality of grief and normalise expressing our truths so that xenophobia, estrangement and apathy are replaced with connection, empathy and oneness.