To get to Bankstown Arts Centre, you must walk past, or encounter through line of sight, the neighbouring trainline. Trains pass by at frequent intervals in a blur of windows, doors and faces, and every so often, you might also glimpse a sprawling line of graffiti. Street writers call this a backjump: a piece painted quickly on the side of a train when parked briefly in traffic or at a terminal, before it proceeds en route to ferry commuters across the metropolis. Of course, backjumps are made with the knowledge they’ll likely be washed off by the day or week’s end, and so these markings are not intended to last, nor, necessarily, should they be read or understood. A backjump, and graffiti more broadly, is simply made to be witnessed.

This exhibition brings together new and existing works as a kind of archive. Illegible graffitied forms collected from sites overseas and across Sydney’s western suburbs are arranged along shelves that mimic a typesetter’s composing stick. In the window galleries—half inside, half outside—three large-scale sculptural works draw from this found graffiti, but also from the surfaces it was written on: lines of mortar between bricks; cyclone-wire fencing; the stem of a climbing plant; a poster pasted over and torn back to reveal what lies beneath. These marks, made by the city’s own infrastructure, co-author a street writer’s inscrutable scrawl.

City walls have long functioned as spaces for voices not otherwise permitted to speak, and so graffiti presides as a voice for the voiceless: sanctioned or unsanctioned, language or non-language. The works in Backjump were initially created as a way of asking what is said by things that resist readability, and yet graffiti, precisely because of its unwieldy illegibility, may be the most comprehensible mark of all; because what it says, even when it says nothing at all, is ‘in this city, I exist somewhere.’