Pop Gallery, Fortitude Valley, Queensland, Australia
December 2022
Group show“For many of these artists, the body is an expanded field. The body is a clearly delineated entity with edges and boundaries, but is also possessed of the space around it, and beyond. Out-of-body experiences manifest in textiles hanging while dalliances with tools or appendages produce peculiar forms of reverse puppetry. As Jane Bennett might say, here the human body is placed in direct relation to non-human bodies and the vitality that flows between these forces is the real bone of contention.4 In other works, collective understandings—or perhaps databases—of memory jostle with fictions of individual worldings while quasi-selves enter the infinite expansiveness of the digital realm as a means through which to narrate queer presents and futures. Language is not evaded here but at times exploited and codified in allusions to mortality and feelings of ‘tonguelessness’. Alongside all of this echoes the heavy refrain: and what does the body hold? It holds trauma. It holds god. It holds ego. And emptiness. As Claudia Rankine might say, thy past has made a cupboard of thy flesh.”
– Sally Molloy, Somatic Algorithmsexhibition text, full text available here.
