Benjamin Sebastian, Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light

About

Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is a timely exhibition of predominantly new works by artist Benjamin Sebastian (1980 AUS/UK) – consisting of digital collage and textiles, soft sculpture and installation, as well as performance art documentation & relics. Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is Sebastian’s largest solo presentation in the UK to date and traces their development as a collage, assemblage, installation & performance artist, sculptor and craftsperson – while foregrounding their current engagement with decoloniality; unpacking their settler heritages, neurodiversity and nonbinary identity.

Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is not intended to make sense, yet rather as a process of sense-making – where hybrid identities, iconoclastic gestures, patchwork (visual) languages and amorphously gendered entities diffuse settled narratives – opening up spaces of unknowing, encouraging moments of contemplation, critical reflection and visioning in relation to the interconnected complexities of our contemporary, social and political landscapes.

Benjamin Sebastian (1980 AUS/UK) is a trans-disciplinary visual artist and curator living in London (UK). Their work spans performance, sculpture, curation, video, text, installation, drawing & new media – rooted in processes of bricolage, assemblage, collage, ritual & DIY cultural production. Through harmonizing nonbinary perspectives, neurodivergent cognition and decolonial practice, Sebastian weaves nascent narratives into existence, offering alternative ways of remembering, being here-and-now, and charting pathways to futures yet formed. They hold a BA Fine Art HONS (1st Class) from the University of Lincoln and MA Curating Art and Public Programmes through Whitechapel Gallery. Sebastian’s continued research interests include; artificial/synthetic intelligence, occult practices, queer ecologies, decolonialism, transhumanism, contemporary performance & visual art. Sebastian is a founding director of both ]performance s p a c e [ and VSSL Studio and their affiliated projects have received funding from Arts Council England, the British Council, Greater London Authority, Creative Folkestone, Kent County Council, Inspire Lewisham, Roger De Haan Charitable Trust and Live Art U.K. as well as other charities and local authorities. Some of their most recent activities include: performance of ‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ as part of Pretty Doomed at Ugly Duck (2023), exhibition of ‘Benjamin Sebastian + Alicia Radage’ at VSSL Studio (2023) curating ‘FACET’ at VSSL Studio (2023), guest curating the ‘Intersect series’ at the Live Art Development Agency (2023), speaking on the symposium; ‘Art, Memory & Place’ at Turner Contemporary (2022), as well as performance of their live installation ‘3 Reflections²’ as part of FUTURERITUAL at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2022).

PV Thursday 12th September, 5-9pm

Instagram: @benjaminsebastian