Marian Abboud
Lives and works on Dharug Country, Australia 

 Sister +++++ Familial Formations III 2026
vehicle, digital prints on fabric, CRT monitors, turquoise, quartz, amber, frankincense, rose, rock sugar Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney
Courtesy of the artist 

A first-generation Australian of North Lebanese heritage, raised in a female-dominant household in Western Sydney, Marian Abboud’s Sister +++++ Familial Formations III invites audiences to explore the nuances of diasporic sisterhood and shared memory. Removing her father’s dilapidated car from the garage, where it has been kept since his passing, Abboud places grief at the centre of a monument to the richness and breadth of matrilineal care. 

Sheer photographs of three generations of the artist’s matrilineal bloodline, aunts, sisters, and nieces, gather around the vehicle like fleeting presences. Sister +++++ Familial Formations III draws private grief into public space, collapsing family history, cultural inheritance, and political condition into a shared act of mourning. Reflective of the Abboud family’s own multi-faceted and diasporic identity, Sister +++++ Familial Formations III defies categorisation, the work reflects a diasporic identity formed across borders, languages, and generations. Through a series of performances in collaboration with the artist’s sisters, mourning becomes collective, embodied, and active, a gesture of care and resistance that insists on presence, continuity, and survival.