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Sab D'Souza, Garburator, 2021. Cement Fondu Commission, sound design Ry Edwards — Unmute Video

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Giselle Stanborough presents ‘Undead Letters,’

Giselle Stanborough presents ‘Undead Letters,’ an installation setup within the lecture theatre in our current exhibition space.

The work which features a large scale wall painting, installation and sound work, considers the persistence of unfulfilled desires from and for the past. Functioning as a self-portrait, Stanborough performs the figure of a ghost to give homage to undying yet uneventuated histories and futures.

She writes that ‘the ghost (dis)embodies knowledge not acknowledged, desires frustrated and business unfinished. She is a figure of the past that refuses to pass and who relentlessly locates herself in the future.’

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Textbook for Desire
20 March - 2 May
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm

It’s the last weekend to catch Jedda Daisy Culle

It’s the last weekend to catch Jedda Daisy Culley's project space ‘Pls send pics this feels one~sided’.

Jedda's installation explores the artist’s desire to be seen and simultaneously unseen, drawing parallels between her uncomfortable relationship with intimacy and her desire to have her paintings seen by others. Exploring the Latin phrase Amor fati, ‘love of fate’, which Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘eternal recurrence’, the Jedda alludes to her fatalistic relationship with misconception through painterly disguises and traces.
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Textbook for Desire
20 March - 2 May
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm

Explored beyond sexual or gendered lenses, the for

Explored beyond sexual or gendered lenses, the forms of desire explored in Textbook for Desire, act as personal, political and social motivators. Critical of the past and longing for changed conditions, our desires anticipate and move us towards alternate worlds, unfixed outcomes and new horizons. In this way, desire becomes a life-structuring way of learning, knowing and sharing knowledge.

Theorist Eve Tuck writes; ‘desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom.’

The artists in Textbook for Desire work oppositionally to the cultural ‘texts’ and learnt narratives that teach us how and what we should want, and whose voices should be prioritised. Featuring new work by Nat Randall & Anna Breckon, Kate Blackmore, Jazz Money, Sab D’Souza, Giselle Stanborough, Sweatshop Women, and New Age Noise, ‘Textbook for Desire’ sees its artists perform, annotate, re-inscribe and share what desire means for them. Running parallel to diverse lived experiences of refusal and re-imagining, desire here becomes a framework that actively platforms new voices, knowledges and ways of being.

Pictured, @jazzmoney_______ ‘Crush’

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Textbook for Desire
20 March - 2 May
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm

We're thrilled that Sab D'Souza is presenting new

We're thrilled that Sab D'Souza is presenting new work for Textbook for Desire, both on our website homepage and in the gallery exhibition. Sab is a brown settler invader, video artist, subtweeter, and researcher living and working on unceded Gadigal land. They draw upon the conventions of diasporic and queer digital cultures found on social media in order to challenge normative infrastructures of power. Much of their work is situated within the websites/platforms they respond to which typically involves: subtweets, google docs, text messages, face filters, insta stories and defunct live-streaming apps. ⁠
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For Textbook for Desire, Sab's new work garburator (2021) draws comparisons between digital datamoshing and haptic, shifting interpersonal desires. Interested in how ideas of gender, race, language and affect are inextricably linked, and how it’s impossible to untangle ideas of personal desire without locating oneself within broader contexts, Sab uses datamoshing to unpack the ways that desiring and being desired has shifted, compressed, and reshaped their (inter)personal relationships.⁠
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You can view Sab's work at the link in bio and at the gallery (hours below). ⁠
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Image by Jacquie Manning⁠
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Textbook for Desire⁠
20 March - 2 May⁠
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm⁠
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‘The Butter Scene’ is a new video artwork by K

‘The Butter Scene’ is a new video artwork by Kate Blackmore that applies a critical feminist lens onto one of cinema’s most controversial rape scenes, the ‘butter scene’ from Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Starring a forty-eight-year-old Marlon Brando and a nineteen-year-old Maria Schneider, it is now known that the filming of that scene involved actual, real life abuse.

The work which is presented on our Mezzanine features actors performing soliloquies that are drawn from media interviews with Schneider and Bertolucci. These found interviews are edited together to form a dialogue honouring Maria’s experience of the scene and the toll it took on her life, whilst also exposing the murky territory between artistic exploration and exploitation in the cinematic image.

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Textbook for Desire
20 March - 2 May
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm | closed this weekend

We’re back in the gallery tomorrow, showing Text

We’re back in the gallery tomorrow, showing Textbook for Desire!

Pictured, ‘3 Scenes: City, Pool, Carol’ is a three channel video projection by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall which pushes back against notions of desire as object oriented and other-directed by depicting solitary moments of immersion into fantasy spaces.

Anna and Nat explore desire as a rhythm and as movements in time that create felt experiences. This model is distinct from object-oriented and identity-based conceptualisations of longing. Rather than presenting desire as an exchange, it is expressed as a mode of interiority and self fulfilment, as occupying space on one’s own terms.

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Textbook for Desire
20 March - 2 May
Open Thursday - Sunday between 11am and 5pm
Closed Friday 2 April - Thursday 9 April