Featuring Award-Winning Photojournalists Kate Geraghty & Barat Ali Batoor this exhibition is an exploration into the darkest hours of a person’s life, when war, conflict and tragedy overlay their existence.

Barat Ali Batoor was born in 1983, in a family that was driven out of Afghanistan during civil war when most of his people were massacred. He returned to his ancestral country for the first time after September 11, 2001, when the Taliban regime was still in Kandahar. After visiting the devastation and destruction of 23 years of war, Batoor decided to draw the world’s attention to the plight of the Afghani people the problems facing the country. He chose photography as his medium of expression.

Photo credit: Barat Ali Batoor

Batoor participated in the ‘Lahore Artist’s Residency’ in Pakistan and was the 2009 recipient of a photography grant from New York’s Open Society Institute for the project “Child Trafficking in Afghanistan/The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan”. At the Nikon-Walkley Awards in 2014, Batoor won Photo of the Year and was a winner in the Photo Essay category.

As part of this exhibition Batoor showcases ‘Hazara Exodus,’ a series of photographs he took along the smugglers’ route through Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, then by sea to Australia. He describes the journey as one of “sudden midnight departures, long road trips, surreptitious transactions, treks through jungles, and terror at sea. It is a journey that mixes fear, boredom and extreme loneliness. A journey that sometimes ends in joy, sometimes in despair and sometimes in death.”

The Jaffary Family waits. ‘We wake up each day hoping this will be the last here in Indonesia,” says mother Rukhsana Jaffary of her mixed Afghan-Pakistani Hazara family, who have been claiming asylum from Indonesia.

The boat Batoor and 92 other asylum seekers took from Indonesia never made it to Australia, but ran aground on rocks. Batoor’s camera was ruined, but his images survived. He was officially recognised as a refugee and resettled in Australia in 2013. ‘Some of the people I met along the way never survived to reach safety in Australia, or anywhere else. My hope is that, at the very least, these pictures can tell their story,’ he says.

Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and STTARS (Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service)

Photo credit: Barat Ali Batoor

FREE at the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery: One Thousand Lifetimes in One Lifetime
Open until 9 December
Open weekdays 9am -5pm, late Thursdays until 7pm