Curated by: Miriam La Rosa.Hangman is a new sound and video installation by Hayden Ryan, developed during his time as Liquid Architecture’s inaugural Artist in Residence on Staff.
Presented as part of HOME 2025: Invisible Cities, curated by Miriam La Rosa and produced in partnership with the City of Greater Dandenong, the exhibition opened on Saturday 21 June at Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre.
Working with the gaps and distortions in the settler-colonial archive, Hangman explores the absence of Aboriginal narratives in official histories, particularly within the Dandenong Heritage Hill collection, which focuses predominantly on postwar migrant stories.
In the face of this silence, Hayden’s installation doesn’t attempt to fill the void, but to make its contours audible. A voice emerges, falters, re-emerges, punctuated by static, distortion, and interference. A video piece accompanies the soundscape, referencing the game of Hangman, using language redaction as metaphor for both archival loss and cultural erasure.
This speculative intervention calls into question who gets remembered, and why. Hangman doesn’t offer answers so much as a space to listen differently, to what has been buried, withheld, or fragmented across time.
The project was created in collaboration with, ENOKi (Visual Artist, Dja Dja Wurrung/Yorta Yorta), Patrick Coppinger (Narrator)
Hayden Ryan is a Yuin sound artist and researcher based in Naarm, whose practice reconnects sonic and spatial knowledges disrupted by colonisation. His work is grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems and explores listening as a method of cultural resurgence.
Hangman is a new, site-specific sound and video installation that reflects on the silences within the settler archive. Responding to the absence of Aboriginal histories at Dandenong’s Heritage Hill precinct, Hayden Ryan draws on the Council’s Oral History Archive, which includes tapes and transcripts of more than 300 interviews focusing on postwar migrant narratives to the area.
Through in-depth research, the artist faces the limitations of historical records—as published sources on Dandenong’s pre-colonial history are scant and largely authored by non-Indigenous writers. The result is an immersive audio experience: a narrator begins to speak, recounting a fragmented story, which is slowly disrupted—cut off, distorted, and submerged—before clarity returns. These interruptions mirror the gaps, omissions, and erasures that mark Australia’s official histories. Alongside, a video reimagines the children’s game of Hangman, evoking both the mechanics of historical redaction and the emotional weight of absence.
By inserting a speculative oral history into the site of the archive, Hangman gestures to what is missing—and what still might be recovered. It is both an act of resistance and remembrance, reanimating the unheard voices that continue to shape the land beneath the record.
Text written by Miriam La Rosa
