Dreaming myself into a future that was worth living brings Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Gordon Bennett and Shaun Gladwell together at Warrnambool Art Gallery to ask the questions: Who gets to live? Whose lives are valued? And who decides? The title comes from writer and historian Morgan M. Page’s account of discovering trans histories and finding new possibilities for the future. Curated by Aaron Bradbrook, the exhibition explores how divergent bodies are classified and controlled – shaping how we live and die.
Within an exhibition environment designed by Brathwaite-Shirley, their works bring questions of watching, being watched, control and choice into the gallery. They confront the actions we take, those we avoid and the responsibility we carry for one another. Bennett’s works consider colonial violence and challenge recorded histories, questioning how powerful institutions decide how bodies are categorised, and who lives. While Gladwell’s Passing Electrical Storms takes visitors through a simulated death experience from cardiac arrest and into the cosmos. The ten-minute virtual reality experience invites audiences to consider their relationship with death and technology.
A standalone art and text publication extends these questions through commissioned essays by Professor Juliet Rogers, Dr Hannah Gould, Serena Wong and Aaron Bradbrook. Designed by Evi-O.Studio and co-published by Warrnambool Art Gallery and Formist Editions, the book brings research on institutional power, death, technology and the body into dialogue with the artists’ work.
As Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley says of galleries, “Currently it feels like they are places where we rest from the world, instead they should be places where we wrestle with the world.”
Choose to rest, or choose to wrestle. Visit Dreaming myself into a future that was worth living at Warrnambool Art Gallery from Saturday 14 November.