Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light

CT20 Projects is delighted to support and host a touring exhibition by Benjamin Sebastian, showing a brand new body of work alongside and in dialogue with existing artworks that span over a decade of practice.

‘All the pieces present are in dialogue with one another to reveal enduring themes across Sebastian’s work – shadow and light, creation and destruction, esotericism, queer subjectivities and colonial heritages.’ (Jane Scarth)

This new exhibition by Benjamin Sebastian confronts their ancestral implication in violent structures of settler-colonialism, while holding space for a spiritually expansive understanding of our relationship to the world around us and the forces that shape it through multiple forms of coloniality.

The exhibition reveals a visual language of stitch, pattern, symbolism and hybridity, developed to unravel complex personal and political histories. Working across performance, collage, textiles and sculptural practice, Sebastian’s poetic interrogation of their own selfhood provides a prism, revealing a spectrum of possible alternatives for being in relation with others, lands, histories, and that which exists beyond tangible experience. Sebastian holds within themselves a range of complex tensions – their queer non-binary identity, their neurodivergence and their deeply spiritual relationship to the world, alongside their settler-colonial Australian Heritage.

All of these factors inform both their artistic methodologies as well as the critical framework within which their practice is situated. The works in this exhibition hold these tensions and reveal a powerful interconnectedness between these states of being. The artworks bring forth other-than-human creatures – from hybrid zoomorphic bodies to amorphously gendered entities – who not only defy the so-called ‘natural’ order but also exist beyond it.

In Sebastian’s own words, ‘I experience the making of art as an act of (practical) magic. The parallels between artistic and occult practices are obvious to me, and I am fascinated by the potential of those practices in creating something from nothing – of drawing that which is yet to exist, into the physical material world. I understand such parallels as explicit links between not only occult and artistic workings, yet also neurodivergent and queer(ed) experiences and actioning of life. All are processes of manifesting something-not-yet-here/known.’

We encounter family photographs, homoerotic male bodies, quilted fragments of their mother’s discarded clothes, the forms of spirits they have been in relation with since adolescence, alongside performance relics imbued with queer symbolism. Through these objects, ‘Holding the Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ is a call to directly confront ancestral and societal traumas, while welcoming a joyful spectrum of possibilities beyond them.

Gallery Images:

[1]: ‘Sigil I – The Seemingly Dangerous and Not without Innocence’ (detail) – One of seven from the ‘Undoing Dee’s Work’ series  – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024

[2]: ‘The Seemingly Innocent Are Not Without Danger’ (detail) – One of seven from the ‘Flag’ series – Benjamin Sebastian – Image by Eda Sancakdar – 2024

[3]: ‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ – Installation shot (ii) – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024

[4]: ‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ – Installation shot (v) – Benjamin Sebastian – Image courtesy of the artist – 2024

[5]: Benjamin Sebastian in their studio. Photographed by Eda Sancakdar. 2024

Public programme:

Artist Talk with curator, Tamsin Hong – details to be announced

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.

Find out more about the exhibition and Sebastian’s artistic process in this interview with Art Verge