Benjamin Sebastian - 'Becoming Constellation'

About

Queerness is not and can never be an identity. It is a current, or imperative. Moving through and between our bodies; it is an intersubjective process of becoming. We are more than our bodies. We are relations in time & space.  -  Benjamin Sebastian.

Becoming Constellation is a period of research and development by artist/curator Benjamin Sebastian with generous support from Arts Council England. A work in progress, Becoming Constellation is an exploration of queer narrative production – or – what it feels like to live through queerness and make new worlds. 

Throughout the R&D period Sebastian is working with ten collaborators. These ten individuals plus Sebastian make up The Human Constellation; a collective tattooing process, act of magic and touring visual art exhibition. Through expanding histories of Sigil Craft (magical statements of intent cast as spells) and creating a collective archive of works from multiple people across time and geography; The Human Constellation begins to map the emotional states, histories and desires of a set of people living through various forms of otherness.

As complement to The Human Constellation, Sebastian has begun working on the production of additional new works, incorporating pole dancing and 3D animation/digital sculpture to explore the past, present & potential futures of these bodies, orbiting each other, living through queerness.

About the artist:

Benjamin Sebastian (1980 AUS/UK) is a visual artist & curator based in Folkestone. Sebastian's practice locates itself within lineages of curating, appropriation art, assemblage, queer research and time-based mediums such as performance art, video and sound/noise. Often incorporating graphic content as a mechanism of resistance, Sebastian's visual language explores how duration, repetition, collaboration and multiplicity can be utilized as technologies of queerness to occupy and reclaim space from heteronormative systems of oppression and control.