Perimeter Editions x Arini Byng | Naarm Melbourne Book Launch
After launching at this year's NY Art Book Fair, Perimeter Editions is thrilled to launch Arini Byng's new publication, Some Voices Carry (Perimeter Editions 138), back home in Naarm/Melbourne! Join us at Perimeter Books (734 High St, Thornbury) from 4pm–6pm for a casual celebration of the book's release, featuring a signing by the artist. A small number of special editions will also be available for purchase.
All are welcome!
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter Books
734 High St, Thornbury VIC
Saturday October 10, 2026
4pm–6pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
Please note that while children are welcome in the space, we are unfortunately unable to offer a 'kid-friendly' zone where kids can entertain themselves, and we require close supervision by parents or guardians while in the store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A man poses for a photograph. He smiles warmly and easily, his face centre-frame. He wears sunglasses, and he holds a baby. His short dreadlocks fall casually; the baby’s tiny hand rests flat on his chest. It looks like summer, late afternoon. A tangle of tropical plants fills the background; a parrot perches on a branch, another flits past overhead. The photograph is layered over a page from a magazine, emblazoned with the header ‘1981 Highlights In Pictures’. It is punctuated by black-and-white images of the time: mourners at the funeral of civil rights leader Roy Wilkins; Michael Jackson’s cover story for the 30th Anniversary issue of JET magazine; a promotion purporting ‘ten ways to get a mink coat’.
The gentle, smiling man in the photograph is Travis Byng, artist Arini Byng’s late father, best friend, and long-time artistic collaborator. He features in several of the photo-collages that populate Some Voices Carry – Byng’s second book with Perimeter Editions – as does her Australian mother, Anna, her sister, Chren, her cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other members of her American family. Created by layering such family snapshots over pages lifted from issues of EBONY magazine – chiefly from 1980 (the year her parents met) and 1982 (the year they were married) – Byng’s images assume various personal and cultural modes and tonalities.
From one vantage, they work as a kind of beacon. In bringing the intimacies of her familial history into dialogue with the editorial, photographic, and visual language of EBONY – a Black-owned and operated magazine whose content shone a light on Black life, culture, current affairs, and social justice – she locates her heritage in the broader cultural milieu and consciousness of the time. But while these images are embodied with such qualities, they also whisper to a kind of cultural distance and yearning. When Travis – who was raised in Philadelphia and migrated to Australia in the mid-1980s – passed away suddenly in 2022, Byng lost not only her beloved father, creative partner, and formative presence in her life, but her primary link to her Black American heritage and the lived cultural experience that shaped it.
As such, these joyful, introspective, and elegiac images prove as speculative as they are reminiscent. They seek to reflect the multiplicity of Black life, and Byng’s simultaneous connection to and disconnection from it. They are her way of reconnecting the dots, using her parents’ camera lens as her guide. Along the journey, Some Voices Carry becomes a reimagining of a world that was, and a relearning of the world that is.