Rewriting the “Textbook for Desire”

Partitions divided each of the artworks in the main gallery. Emanating from the room on the left was a haunting soundscape, drawing audiences to Sydney-based Sab d’Souza’s single-channel video Garburator (2021). A monologue emerges in animated fonts over datamoshed footage from the artist’s various social media platforms, including TikTok. We glean them in front of female public toilets, dressing/undressing, hanging out with friends, and taking mirror selfies, among other everyday activities. The voiceover repeats, “By wearing another’s skin, somehow I’m stretching out its edges to become your own . . . a desire for a certain type of beauty, race, power.” They ask, rhetorically, “Is it simply enough to acknowledge this?” before defiantly answering, “I don’t think so.” Thinking about what it means to apply desire to their hypervisible trans body within colonial and capitalist frameworks, d’Souza resists categorizations, hoping for new ways to simply “desire you as you exist.”

In the opposite room, Sydney-based duo Anna Breckon and Nat Randall’s three-channel video 3 Scenes: City, Pool, Carol (2021) comprises single-take footage of a lone figure immersed in tranquil moments of domesticity, with their face either cropped or hidden from view. The audio track pulls each projection into singular focus: the sound of a cracking eggshell draws attention to the video on the left, where the character eats breakfast against a backdrop of skyscrapers. Beckoned by the sound of splashing, one’s gaze moves to the nude figure atop an inflatable mat floating in a pool on the middle screen. Then, a heated argument is heard from the right: “Why don’t you leave me alone?!/I was going to ask you to marry me for Christ’s sake!/I never asked you for anything, maybe that’s the problem,” contrasting the on-screen depiction of a woman watching Todd Haynes’s 2015 film Carol in bed while drinking a glass of red wine. The acts are presented in isolation from each other, and yet the pervading feeling is one of calm. Like the protagonist’s desire for independence, Breckon and Randall prioritize a desire for oneself that refutes the idea that one is incomplete without a partner. Desire, in this context, becomes a way of accessing and nourishing one’s own interiority. It is a process of self-fulfillment.

In the room at the end of the hallway was a highlight work: Wiradjuri poet and filmmaker Jazz Money’s video Crush (2021), which was projected across an entire wall. Viewers were immersed in luscious scenes of native Australian plants encased in melting ice cubes that are suspended against a clear, blue sky. Money sensually licks some of these glistening pieces of ice, placing them in her mouth, or dripping the thawing liquid over her body. These scenes are broken up with frames of Wiradjuri words and overlaid with Money’s poetry, in which she articulates how her existence and Indigenous queer bodies have been fetishized and rendered abject in the White, colonial imagination—“We watch you watch/They collect/We yearn.” Signaling her desire for escape and her refusal to settle, she elucidates, “We create new worlds/We defy,” tenderly imploring us to “Watch the colony melt away” to create space for healing and renewal.   

For the artists in the exhibition, desire is a way of knowing oneself beyond normative frameworks of thinking and being. These differing perspectives are a potent reminder that only when we distinguish ourselves from these learned narratives and recast new possibilities can we desire fully and freely.

Yuna Lee is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

“Textbook for Desire” is on view at Cement Fondu, Sydney, until May 2, 2021.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.