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Benjamin Sebastian is the VSSL co-director. The exhibition traces their development as a collage, assemblage, craftsperson, sculptor, installation and performance artist.

https://vssl-studio.org/Holding-The-Shadow-While-Calling-Back-The-Light

Benjamin Sebastian in their studio. Photographed by Eda Sancakdar. 2024

Joseph Morgan Schofield: Benjamin, you’ve been touring your solo show, Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light. The third leg of this tour opens at VSSL Studio at the end of January. What can we expect to see in the show at VSSL?

Benjamin Sebastian: The exhibition brings together over a decade’s worth of my practice, including a collage series created from digital prints and archival aquatints, as well as performance art documentation (video, photographs and a wearable sculpture). In addition to these older works, I’ve created a body of new textile, soft sculpture and installation works crafted from a silver gelatin photograph, gold leaf, printed calico, reconstituted nylon flag pieces, and patchwork quilting of my mother’s discarded clothes. The exhibition design weaves all of these works together into a large-scale installation, central to which are three ambiguously gendered, human-sized Entities (patchwork soft sculptures fringed with black feather) encircling a fragmented seven-pointed star (diamond-framed textile works). Constellating these are the remaining collage and textile works.

'Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light' - Installation shot at Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury - Benjamin Sebastian - Image courtesy of the artist - 2024.
‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ – Installation shot at Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024.

I have attempted to embody a sense of liveness within the space by allowing the audio from video documentation to spill out into the space. Repeating cries of the word ‘wolf’ and lyrics such as ‘I called out, and all that I heard was the echo of a star’ spill out into the space and wash over all of the other works. I have also installed the wearable sculpture (a body harness created from O Rings, jeweller’s chain and chandelier pendants) at torso height from a rotating mirror ball mount, echoing its original performance context. 

You have been cutting up iconography and symbols that reference your experiences growing up in Australia. The work seems to engage in a process of reckoning with (or reconciling) different forces—of settler-colonialism and a spiritual belief system that feels very rooted in the landscape of your youth. Can you say more about that?

I’m definitely grappling with the realities of settler-colonialism, and my work has undoubtedly been informed by both spiritual and occult belief systems, but I don’t think that these are specific to (the land we now call) Australia. In fact, the whole premise of this exhibition is an acknowledgement that I only have a personal connection to Australia because of British colonisation. I am wrestling with ideas of what it means to be born as a settler on unceded Indigenous land while also holding a deep spiritual connection to that land. Growing up in Australia, I was immersed in a cosmology (dreaming) that wasn’t mine while simultaneously feeling a pull toward its sacred ecologies. The soft sculptural Entities in this exhibition – while distinct in being – share an affinity with the visual forms of Quinkan and Wandjina (different types of spirits) from Indigenous Australian Dreaming. I want to further explore – in honest, open and respectful ways, the influences I have known, how these have shaped my being and visual language and what that means in the context of contemporary Australia, as it remains a colony of the British Empire.

What connections do you make between this and queerness?

Queerness, for me, exists in the spaces between things – much like (post)colonial subjects between binaries, categories, and imposed structures of power. Colonialism, like heteronormativity, depends on strict systems of control and domination. My work disrupts these systems by embodying queer subjectivities as hybrid forms: human-animal figures, ambiguously gendered entities, and relational dynamics charged with homoeroticism. The soft sculptures, textile works, and performance relics in this exhibition resist simple categorisation; they are mutable, liminal, and, therefore, quietly defiant. The relationship between queerness and colonialism isn’t just metaphorical or poetic for me. The colonial project enforced compulsory heterosexuality and binary gender norms. To exist queerly, especially in an ongoing colonial context, is to resist and reimagine those structures, to reclaim agency over one’s body and narrative.

'Phoenix' - Performance Documentation - Benjamin Sebastian - Photographed by Marco Berardi. Image courtesy of the artist - 2013
‘Phoenix’ – Performance Documentation – Benjamin Sebastian – Photographed by Marco Berardi. Image courtesy of the artist – 2013

Hearing you say that ‘to exist queerly … is to resist and reimagine those structures’ makes me think about time and about the way queer existence shifts as we move in time. You’ve included some older works in this exhibition. How do you look at these pieces, which were made in a different context and at a different time in your life, now?

Revisiting older works is like encountering past selves for me, like re-reading a letter you wrote as a younger version of yourself. The pieces in Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light certainly reflect ongoing preoccupations of mine: performance as ritual, the body as a site of transformation and resistance, and the intersections of industrial, queer, and colonial histories. Works like Dead Queer Sex Fag (2013) remind me of my ongoing exploration of Victorian categorisation and queer eroticism within the mechanics of empire. Context shifts, but the core questions have persisted for me. Now, with distance, I see how these earlier works laid the groundwork for some of my newer pieces. I almost left the older works out of this show, but they all speak to each other, forming a constellation of ideas across time. There is something in this for me about trying to sculpt a neurodiverse (visual) language. Through mapping these works across time in the now finite space of the exhibition, I think I am starting to better know my own work, coming to understand the connections between things and crafting a more articulate visual language retrospectively.

'Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light' - Installation shot at Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury - Benjamin Sebastian - Image courtesy of the artist - 2024
‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ – Installation shot at Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024

What’s exciting you in queer art and culture currently?

I have always been drawn to the more political, speculative, cruisy and occult aspects of queer culture. I’m currently getting off on the artistic practices of Anne Imhof, Libby Heaney, Sin Wai Kin, Liz Rosenfeld and Carlos Martiel. I am also re-reading texts by Erica Lagalisse, José Esteban Muñoz and Jason Louv at the minute, which explore occult, anarchistic and (de)colonial histories and futures. I have loved seeing a resurgence in cruising and ballroom cultures within younger generations of our communities, the former being very dear to my heart.

I would say I am much more interested in processes of queerness rather than queer this or that as a signifier of identity. As things start to align queerness with identity, I tend to move in a different direction. I think the most uplifting thing regarding queer culture for me currently is the growing embrace of intersectional politics – that shared acknowledgement that all things impact and are connected to all other things. I also feel quite empowered to witness equality discourse, making more space for equity discourse. Ultimately, I see no difference between the world-making potentials of art, occult practices and queerness, so anything operating at or close to the intersection of these modalities gets me hot.

Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Lights opens at Deptford’s VSSL Studio on 31 January and continues until 28 February 2025, Enclave 50, Resolution Way, London SE8 4AL, UK

And continues at Herbert Read Gallery (Canterbury).

'Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light' - Installation shot at CT20, Folkestone - Benjamin Sebastian - Image courtesy of the artist - 2024
‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ – Installation shot at CT20, Folkestone – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024

All images supplied

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