Digital Relationalities as Queer Praxis: Response to UNSW Galleries’ Friendship as a Way of Life

By impeding the access that members of the public have to physical gallery space, COVID-19 lockdowns have forced museums and institutions to rethink the kinds of relational experiences that they can offer audiences. Reconsidering such a relational space however, is especially significant for UNSW Galleries’ Friendship as a Way of Life. With a thematic assemblage of works considering constellations of queer kinship, bonds and community, the exhibition draws its title from Michel Foucault’s seminal interview on queer friendship[1]. Beyond a thematic approach to this subject matter, through its innovative adaptation to COVID-19 necessitated shutdowns UNSW Galleries has embodied a methodology of multiplicitous reading, community-building and knowledge-sharing that demonstrates what queer theorists Damon Young and Joshua Weiner describe as ‘relations radically in excess of humanist and neoliberal accounts of the individual[2].’

Having to relocate rurally out of Sydney due to the pressures of the pandemic, my experience of this exhibition first occurred online. One of the first programs I interacted with was the livestreamed ‘In Conversation’ between artist Nikos Pantazopoulos and his friend, curator Madé Spencer-Castle. Pantazopoulos spoke to two bodies of work included in the exhibition, one being the new archival imaginary of How to make a monument (2013) which unearths the history of a demolished gay beat, transforming it into an architectural model and accompanying artist book. As Pantazopolous and Spencer-Castle meditated on the shut down, demolished, and vanished beats depicted in the artist’s work, I thought of the poetic intangibility of social sites that had proverbially ‘vanished’ during COVID-19, and the utopian gesture of reconstructing these as conceptual spaces. Pantazopolous’ activation of community histories and archives is a generative process, in keeping with Friendship As a Way of Life’s digital re-imagination of the exhibition site as a meaningful and dynamic adaptation to lockdown.

The online ‘companion program’ features a series of ‘In Conversation’ livestreams with room for audience questions; additional interactive exhibition content presented digitally; and ‘a series of illustrated talks explores LGBTQI+ gatherings in Australia.’ The unique function of this program is not just to re-contextualise the exhibition’s themes, but as an expansive exhibitionary element allowing new pathways for objects to be received, read and understood. Physical, digital platforms and iterations are interwoven, resulting in a rich tapestry of programming and objects which bypass the centrality of the exhibition space rather than existing as complimentary tokens to it. Such relational multiplicity reformulates an individual’s relationship to COVID-19 time and space, embodying the thematic premise of the exhibition and demonstrating a queer dynamism and adaptability to shifting circumstances. This adaptability has the potential to reactivate archives in order to turn what Hal Foster identifies as:

Pantazopoulos’ vanished beat becomes a plurality of material and immaterial, literal and figurative platforms for new futures. The active building of histories as ‘construction sites’ in the context of this exhibition unsettles normative conceptions of knowledge production and transmission to offer a multitude of perspectives and counterknowledges[4]. We see for example, a newly digital incarnation of Mother Inferior’s Exorcism for Healing the World on Instagram, alongside physical archival documents of the 1984 Order of Service for a Solemn Exorcism in the gallery. These ‘Exorcisms’ are further contextualised in talks with Committee Member of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives Nick Henderson, presenting a multi-platformed dialogue with archival material. Simultaneously, livestreams such as curator Kelly Doley and DJ Gemma’s ‘In Conversation’ effectually become recorded oral histories of Sydney’s queer night life. Through living contributions such as these, voices are activated and conversations begin, evoking a queer temporality that feeds and enriches contemporary communities beyond a one-dimensional display and excavation of artefacts, and in dialogue with the present. This reworking of the exhibitionary mode as a response to the pandemic, understands communities and their histories as generative and responsive.

Through its presentation of queer friendships, communities and kinship, Friendship as a Way of Life enacts a curatorial methodology which constructs alternative landscapes and fields of making. This demonstrates the richness of queer identity as it is lived regardless of location and access to physical space. As is reflected in the contributions of Nikos Pantazopoulos, Mother Inferior and DJ Gemma, what is presented in this discursive space is both nostalgic and utopian. This exhibition presents queer friendship and community as collaborative, generative practices, highlighting their necessity for activism and making in the service of yet unimaginable futures[5]. As COVID-19 has forced institutions to navigate new territory in the face of lockdowns, Friendship as a Way of Life offers a rich example of how restriction can be harnessed as a relational space in its own right.