Ngunnawal Country Launch of The Nightmare Sequence

Join prize-winning graphic novelist, Safdar Ahmed (NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year 2022), for the launch of The Nightmare Sequence, and the opportunity to think beyond silence in the face of the horrific events in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Safdar will be in conversation with Dr Bilquis Ghani, Lecturer in Arts at the University of Canberra.

$10 entry. Buy tickets here.

All proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the UNICEF Gaza appeal.

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies.

Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media – including their own – in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas.

With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, The Nightmare Sequence is an insightful work of testimony that also considers how art is complicit in Empire. This transcendent book invokes the power of poetry and art to shift hearts and minds; it will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

Dr Safdar Ahmed is an award-winning artist, writer, musician and cultural worker. His graphic novel Still Alive won the Multicultural NSW Award and was named Book of the Year in the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Still Alivealso won the 2022 Eve Pownall Award and a Gold Ledger in the 2022 Comic Arts Awards of Australia. Safdar is a founding member of the Refugee Art Project and a member of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers. The Nightmare Sequence, a collaboration with Omar Sakr, is his latest work.

Dr Bilquis Ghani is Lecturer in Arts at the University of Canberra. Her research focuses on the mobilisation of the creative process through moments of social and cultural rupture. Bilquis’s book, Sociology From Art Praxis in Afghanistan: Expression and Resistance in Kabul, will be released by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2025. Before returning to academia, Bilquis was also Head of Inclusion at the Sydney Opera House.