EO GILL

FULGORA, QUEER CONTEMPORARY, NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, NSW - 3 FEBRUARY - 5 MARCH 2023
EO GILL (CUR) TARIK AHLIP, CLAUDIA NICHOLSON, JIMMY NUTTALL, AINSLIE TEMPLETON, VICTORIA TODOROV
DIRTY LOOKS (CUR) TOM CHAMONT, MICHAEL ZEN

More commonly known as “the lantern fly,” the fulgora is a species of winged insect with a large, bulbous proboscis on its head.  The fulgora proboscis has no obvious practical or survivalist function. Originally thought to produce light, the lantern-like proboscis extends before the insect  as an empty protuberance nearly as voluminous as its body. The entomologist Roger Caillois gives  the proboscis as a material example of “luxury” or excess, something to do with mimicry rather than nature or need..  The extravagant proboscis on the fulgora reveals a body succumbing to the lure of space. In Callois’s account, the useless appendage spells the death of the autonomous subject and betokens the emergence of a subject in pieces.

For the purposes of this exhibition, the fulgora has been engaged as a figure of bodily decadence. Fulgora delights in perversion, indulgence and pleasure on the one hand, and evasion, disappearance and deception on the other. It opens up a space for ambiguity and resistance in queer video-making practices. 

The Fulgora program includes artists whose works engage the erotic qualities of cinema and image-making. Fulgora speaks to luxuriant video practices that hold the viewer in a promiscuous state. The works include intimate portraits of friends, lovers and places, and lyric evocations of the ordinary world that also bear witness to an unabashedly erotic, perverse parallel universe. Like the codings of camp, these works often collapse the distinction between truth and fiction, character and persona, scripted action and improvisation. They exist at the representational edge, a point where conventional acts of looking are disrupted and we are forced to  ask where pleasure begins.

Fulgora features four new video commissions by Tarik Ahlip, Jimmy Nuttall, Ainslie Templeton and Victoria Todorov and an existing video work by Claudia Nicholson. These Australian pieces are punctuated by two older US films, Tattoo (1975) by Michael Zen and Razorhead (1981) by Tom Chomont, programmed in collaboration with LA-based collective Dirty Looks Inc.These two films have been included in Fulgora because they serve as an historical and aesthetic anchoring point for contemporary queer moving-image making.