2025 FINALIST
NFD - Not Further Defined - My Father
Connor Bashar
- Sitter: Shervin Bashar
- Medium: Digital Artwork
- Dimensions: 45 x 75cm
- Artist Age: 17
- Artist School: Queensland Academies Creative Industries (QACI)
2025 Next Gen Prize
Proudly supported by
Gadens
About the work
A fingerprint is meant to define us; utterly unique, immutable, and individual. Yet for many, identity is something more complex than one impression.
This portrait explores my experience as a Persian Australian growing up between cultures and navigating the space where they blur. The eyes belong to my father, layered within my own fingerprint, a subtle collision of heritage, ancestry, and perception. In combining photography and print, I wanted to challenge the idea that we can be easily categorised.
The title Not Further Defined is borrowed from official documents that couldn’t place us – a quiet but telling detail that reflects the dissonance of mixed identity. This piece isn’t about providing answers. It invites the viewer to consider how they see others, and what assumptions they carry. For me, this is an exploration of how we’re perceived and how we see ourselves, especially when living in the ‘third space’ between cultures.
Judge's Notes
It is always exciting, thought provoking, and sometimes deeply moving to encounter and have time to consider the art of young people. Our next generation of artists bring before us important ideas and images of their identities and attitudes as they take shape. Connor Bashar’s image is poetic and political, and an honouring of his family’s Persian heritage.
It is easy to forget that every individual can be identified by something so basic yet so complicated as our fingerprint. Connor’s work is mesmerising in its clever melding of the face – which is always subject to change – and the fingerprint, which never changes. This is a work that is self-reflective but determined in its critique of how we are seen and how cultural and social individual difference is seen and understood. This image is a poignant, declarative mark. For me it powerfully asserts that ‘in this print, I Am’.
Jason Smith, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia
Chief Judge, 2025
