AMIRA HAJAR, CHRISTINE DEAN, DEL LUMANTA, HARRY PICKERING, JEREMY ANDERSON, JOE BRENNAN, JONNO REVANCHE, KATHERINE CORCORAN, LEILA EL REYES, LEENA RIETHMULLER, PETER WAPLES CROWE, SHAREEKA HELALUDDIN, TARIK AHLIP & TYZA STEWART
’TO THE INCLUSION OF ALL OTHERS’
CURATED BY NINA DODD & JONNO REVANCHE
2 NOVEMBER – 2 DECEMBER, 2017
To the inclusion of all others, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: From the left, there is a photographic fabric that is hung by a curtain rod and is sitting on the floor. It looks like it could be of the rocks at the beach. In the middle are two canvases, with cream and white textured abstract surfaces, with the one on the left having a dark purple tone on the top half of the canvas. To the far right there is a large print of black text, reciting a piece of writing.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
“Starving mice will often eat their own tails before ceding to hunger.” – Kaveh Akbar
If you want a run-down of human history, imagine links, chains, binds, with a vindicated kind of force, holding us together while a multitude of hands pull us apart. It’s unceremonious, the grabby knuckles, the way we get so lopsided after. We can create a response, reflect back to our own kinds of ritual. Actions that are in unison, that are feisty, aggravated, disconcerted - as long as they don’t see us sweat or get so close that they can swickit off our skin.
To the inclusion of all others, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: In the space there is a window door suspended, with the top right panel broken. With black spray painted text graffitied all over it. On the floor, there is a brick with a purple dildo strapped to it.
A friendship shared between queer people can 1) light up, 2) burn, 3) can become stoic or romantic, 4) alchemise and bloom, 5) type out sentiments of appreciation, 6) send the charred remains of lucidity, care and protection spiraling into the sky as tiny shards of blackened, orchestra glass. When it is that much more necessary, it holds twice as much celestiality. If queer connection is tender, then it is also obvious, broken, repairing, compromised. Queer friendship is honest in vulnerability because it is demanding of it – it is open in necessity and fiercely held in its intention. It is sadly underneath the grave, like Anne Boyer wrote, as deep as the hole we fall into. It is, sometimes, “falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug.” When it fails, it is that much more injurious.
Quiet, predisposed forces made from giant bones and factory dogs bray at the shelter, conspire to weaken our connections and invisibilise our friendships, but if you watch, there is humour and protection in the squiggly, indiscernible, metallic nature of our love. To reduce us to tinier things, much more of this metal will have to be hacksawed away. They will take some time. In every attack that is written, in the spates of harassment that build to a crescendo as the media recognizes us and singles us out, all that hysteric intention, our hands grip tighter. It’s futile, trying to invest so much in that flesh-like untangling. They are like tantrums in the form of human outline, building from the inside, those stupid childish tall silhouettes, knowing of the circles they’ve been tied into. On arms, on shoulders, on language and letters and queer bibliographies, it's all there.
To the inclusion of all others, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: From the left, there is a broken window door shot from behind, only able to see distorted parts of it. On the far right back wall, there is a large print with black text of a piece of writing. With a brightly coloured canvas sitting next to it, with different letters of the alphabet written all over it in no particular order.
“I’ve shared stories about growing up and realising I was different; when I was 11 and I identified most with Kristy, the future-lesbian from the Baby-Sitters Club; when instead of obsessing over Devon Sawa in the movie Casper like my friends, I was rewinding to watch Christina Ricci say things in a way I liked….After being isolated and alone for so long, the sense of belonging that you feel when you connect with groups of queer people and allies is indescribable. When I think of it even now, it can take my breath away.” – Rebecca Shaw
The Australian postal vote for marriage equality brought to life ancient, bizarre things. And as far as the queer community has shared goals, it is necessarily splintered. A snake finds its food at long last. It is somehow comforting, for it to be so out of the open, to be on the same valley at last, even if some of us are more confused about why we are there. We are reduced to bugs, and adorned multiplicitous insects, all sticking out in this inalienable way. Birds, and brothers. Monsters, and their matriarchal family units. Assembling in the detritus, we bump against each other, skirt around the reptiles, doused in bile and leftover things. We’ve been let out! There’s no time, none, to consider where we’re headed.
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connection to everything. You also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others.” – Andrew Boyd
Artists in the exhibition To the inclusion of all others used the postal survey on marriage equality as a springboard to consider the political base of anti-queer decisions, the larger conversations it could inspire about the life-saving and deeply needed potency of friendships between LGBT/queer people, distanced histories, and social commentary. The show intended to be a reminder of the need to leave evidence, to reimagine queer ceremony, communion and self-affirmation, and to weigh ourselves into culture, resisting and getting red-faced in the face of danger or delegitimisation.
At the entrance of the exhibition, Tyza Stewart presented a water colour pond holding a family of rat-tailed maggots clinging to a sculpey lettuce leaf. Would it be crass to compare the rat-tailed maggots at Glastonbury festival to queer community? Ambiguously gendered selves, reconsidered rude stereotypes, swum like rat-tailed maggots over the course of five weeks of the exhibition.
To the inclusion of all others, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: On the far left back wall, there is a large print with black text of a piece of writing. With a brightly coloured canvas sitting next to it, with different letters of the alphabet written all over it in no particular order. To the right, there are three blue ratchet straps hanging on the wall to the ground. With two large metal hoops sitting on the floor next to it, and a screen to the far right with an abstracted grey image on it.
Around the corner, Leena Riethmuller’s works were waiting to be physically or speculatively strapped upon bodies and things, making space to consider control, consent and negotiate new ways of relating to one another. They were hung as tools in a shed, where we can study agency through self-experimentation.
Munoz described a queer aesthetic as having the capacity to map a forward-dawning futurity and to carve paths of potentiality. Along the wall, two rings of Saturn, matrimony, frozen, twisted together nested in the corner space. Above, a figure reclined along a rocky, geode-like form, spinning in blackness. Katherine Corcoran investigated the potential for queer subjectivity and atypical modes of desire to be explored as virtual centers of power. A flesh that flows, a sound that fucks, a platonic hard on. Manifestations, spells and delusions.
First against the back wall, Jonno Revanche took an image from a wider series titled Domestika. This out-take brought together sentiments of regional queerness and belonging, self-mythology as survival, marginality, horizontality and the potential for personal memory - as part of a larger lineage or timeline - to be rendered a liability. The work asked questions about the potential for outside physical communities, distance, the longing and desire present in young LGBT/queer people outside cultural hubs to be recognised and seen by kin.
To the right, two monochromatic works by Tarik Ahlip sat as relics of an intimate process, pigment applied and wiped away leaving plaster plates that conjure landscape, place and history. The titles directly quote or refer to imagery from Classic Islamic and Christian texts, while inferring the spirit of a certain school of contemporary Arab poetry - most notably the work of Adunis, the Syrian poet in/of exile.
Second from last on the back wall, one of Shareeka Helaluddins’ posters sat opposite its sister text. The black letters pointed towards a galaxy of thought, how we can call-out and resist structures of oppression and how we can heal from them and sustain each other.
To the inclusion of all others, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a brightly coloured canvas sitting next to it, with different letters of the alphabet written all over it in no particular order on the left. To the right, there are three blue ratchet straps hanging on the wall to the ground.
Last in the row, Amira Hajar invited viewers to take a collaborative playlist of “Queer Comfort Songs." The artists gifted QR codes as trinkets and keepsakes, to be kept close by inside your wallet and drawn from it in times of need.
In the right corner sat Del Lumanta’s work, angled towards the park where it was sprayed. The work was a kind of a power fantasy, joyously and defiantly reversing the power dynamic between queers and the majority – what does it look like, and feel like? Is the destruction of property more important than real violence inflicted against queer people? It references the spate of slurs and antagonistic phrases that proliferated on public buildings following the announcement of the postal vote.
Harry Pickering and Leila el Rayes worked collaboratively to craft a narrative of tender queer moments, faces looking towards justice, bodies aglow, dispersed and overlaid with nostalgic markings and gestures.
Peter Waples-Crowe spoke on the fondness he holds for his island neighbors, the original image was given by Taloi from Bougainville, a glimmering painting of a warrior, wearing a men's bag over his shoulder.
The text in Christine Dean’s piece was based on a quote from an important and overlooked book called 'The Drag Queen Scene' by Roberta Perkins, the first academic study of transsexualism in Australia, based on research conducted in 1978 as part of her Honours thesis. The painting dealt with transgender history in an uncompromising way.
Joe Brennan’s portraits—art directed by sitter Rowan Oliver—spoke to the fraught processes of queered collaboration within public spaces. Here is a quiet kind of kinship that nevertheless makes itself known, that inadvertently provokes voyeurism. What are they doing? Why are they doing it?