Khadim Ali is based in Western Sydney he is a Hazara man from Afghanistan although born in Pakistan where his family were exiled. He came to Australia around 2009, and he gained his citizenship a couple of years ago. He is interestingly trained both as a mural painter in Iran and as a miniature painter in Pakistan, and someone said to me the other day, "What we have there with the work from the National is the largest miniature painting in the world" which is probably quite true.

Khadim has made the MCA foyer wall mural which is an ongoing series of works specifically for the MCA for The National. It features a series of figures, demon figures, standing about and sitting, waiting. Now these figures are drawn a little bit from Rostam who is from the Book of Kings which is an ancient Afghani or Persian poem and it's a text to which Ali has gone back to a number of times in his career, and it's partly about his identification with this figure even as a child actually and then how that figure has been viewed from multiple perspectives in recent times. Demonised, on one hand, viewed as a hero on another and particularly the way in which that figure was co-opted by the Taliban who have persecuted the Hazari people for many years.

So when I visited Ali in his studio, he showed me his Australian passport which he hadn't had for very long and talked about how precious it was. Then he showed me through the images in the passport which are one might call typical or cliché, Australian scenes people playing cricket, Uluru, sheep grazing, surf life savers, etcetera. All those images on each page framed by foliage, by eucalypt foliage, or wattle, or similar, so Australian native flora.

He said that the images were really strong to him because they spoke to how he saw himself because if you look at the image, you're actually looking from behind that foliage and onto the scene. You're slightly distant from that scene; you're separated slightly from it, you're sort of lurking in the trees on the edge. As a new migrant, he felt that he felt both part of a place but also somehow kept on the edge of the place. That idea of being on the edge is of course also in a far more problematic way, the experience of many refugees and asylum seekers and kept in detention centres offshore Australia and elsewhere around the world, and it's an experience to which he can speak to from his own family experience.

So those figures on the wall here framed by this beautiful gold leaf foliage, so it's us looking in on those figures or them looking in on us. One of them has actually turned to face Circular Quay with such a potent sort of sight for arrival in Australia he has these figures just waiting. So he has this great density of just time passing of them waiting being excluded from a place and with the title The Arrival of the Demons, also this idea of demonization of the asylum seeker which is something he feels so strongly about.

So it is an extraordinary work where he's brought together the techniques learned in making really quite propagandist murals in Iran as a young man for training, and then there's miniature work which is being better known for since he arrived in Australia on to this scene. This massive painting which is many, many, metres long and about six metres high at its highest point.