About
MY PORNOGRAPHIC HEART
Benjamin Sebastian
03 - 23 August 2013
Private View: 02 August 2013 19.00h - 22.00h
My Pornographic Heart is a solo exhibition of new works by Benjamin Sebastian. Drifting between assemblage, 2D collage, video collage and live action, these works explore the delicacy and intimately pornographic elements of sex and gender oscillating the male body. Sebastian fuses found image and text with words and objects of his own, creating a complex visual outcome for the viewer.
Alterations in scale, together with the juxtaposition of images (graphic and naive), are intended to encourage the viewer to consider the ways in which we think about the private and the public, the domestic and the colonial. (In one image we see the Queen's head on a postal stamp positioned beside a man's exposed arsehole while he masturbates). Sebastian's magpie aesthetics challenge the appropriateness of appropriation and the boundaries of identities and power.
His loaded emblems sit adjacent to one another, colliding an old world sense of etiquette and normative societal stereotypes, against a contemporary call for collective otherness and multiplicity.
How does this work challenge us? Sebastian's pornographic heart is revealed here not to arouse, but to critique and question. These works demand our attention by insisting on the importance of the intimate, the unseen/off-scene (obscene) as a site/sight for addressing issues of queer love, power, and the multiplicity of becoming-(non)identities.
CLOSING PARTY, BOOK LAUNCH and LIVE PERFORMANCE
23 August 2013 7pm - late
(More details to follow)
>>> Benjamin Sebastian
Benjamin Sebastian (AU/GB, 1980) is an artist/curator based in London, UK. Historically located within lineages of Appropriation Art and Assemblage, the artist's practice is interdisciplinary. Their processes actively interrogate various dialectic relationships, fundamentally those of logic vs the irrational, as well as creation vs destruction. They work primarily with the materials of their body, paper, fire, thread, porn & found or reclaimed objects, to create assemblage and time based work. This practice is a refusal of classification via style or medium, continuously attempting to find reason in the irrational, the profound in the mundane and self, or voice, in otherness; through strategies of repetition, appropriation, duration & Liveness.
Sebastian has studied art and performance practices in Germany, Australia and the UK and in 2012 was awarded the Artists' International Development Fund by the British Council and Arts Council England. They are co-founder of the performance platforms; tension/intervention/restraint & ArtEvict.
They are currently co-director of ]performance s p a c e [ - London. UK.
Website: www.benjmain-sebastian.com
