‘Textbook for Desire’ is an exhibition of newly-commissioned video works and installations, as well as a series of live, expanded ‘lectures’ that include music, dance and performance. The exhibition reflects how normative forms of desire are revised or struck through, making space for alternative and marginalised ways of thinking, being and desiring.

Explored beyond sexual or gendered lenses, the forms of desire in this exhibition 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.

The exhibition is installed around a central ‘lecture theatre,’ which will be activated throughout the show by a series of expanded performance lectures, aiming to share specific knowledges of desire. These events will kick-off on March 27th for the Art Month Paddington gallery crawl, and will follow on April 17th.

Hosted on the front page of our website for the duration of Textbook for Desire is ‘Garburator,’ a new video work by Sab D’Souza that draws comparisons between digital datamoshing and haptic, shifting interpersonal desires. They’re 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. Datamoshing is an unstable and glitchy form of compression that happens when two videos are overlaid, or their metadata is corrupted. This becomes a metaphor for D’Souza to unpack the ways that desiring and being desired has shifted, compressed, and reshaped their (inter)personal relationships.