In its last week, the exhibition, Surfacing, at the new permanent home of the Melbourne art collective Trocadero Projects, showcases community through queer and diasporic lenses. This exhibition features four emerging artists of multicultural origins and features photography, poetics and sound to examine cultural history, queerness and generational ties. The exhibition is part of Queer PHOTO, presented by Midsumma and PHOTO 2024.
The exhibition features the bold work of Dorcas Tang, a queer Chinese diaspora artist who staged a portrait series of the community at the Bearded Tit, a bar and gallery space in Redfern, comprising portraits that show how people have formed community according to necessity and survival. Tang’s portraits have also appeared in the promotional materials of the North Melbourne arts venue Arts House. A companion oral interview history of the Tit, collected in an accompanying booklet, juxtaposes how community is often built in response to homophobic violence. This is not only a love letter to the queer community, but also a love letter to the relationships we cultivate with each other.
Rômy Pacquing McCoy’s body of work, scattered around the gallery space, reflects the underlying treatment of the often ignored, unseen and complex lived experiences of Indigenous people of colour, as well as disabled people pushed to the corners of daily life.
The collage of materials and unconventional creation of photographs – including a self-portrait that utilises banana leaves and recycled tin cans – nods to the mass manufacturing conducted by overseas Filipino workers. The artist, who identifies by the moniker Rô, invites an unsettling reflection of society that selects acceptable types of experience and, through selection, minimises and sometimes erases difference.
Estelle Yoon’s bilingual piece, Anatomy of a Kiss, is a series of positive film strips using hanji, traditional Korean paper, to create anatomical layers and intimate moments that show Yoon and her partner kissing. Like Tang’s work, this personal portraiture, which is in Yoon’s case, self-portraiture, memorialises how queer culture defines diverse and dynamic love throughout the Asian diasporic community as well as the queer community.
Luce Nguyễn-Hunt’s My Soul’s Sight is a photographic light collection that features a neon sign with the line from the poem that has also given the exhibition its title. The artist describes in the program notes how working with neon contains elements of fire as a symbolising spirit of the divine, as well as a sign of renewal. The fact that the neon for the word “soul” broke during transportation has been incorporated into the performance, encompassing the fragility of the soul and the irreparability of the material once separated from the spirit.
Read: Exhibition review: Melbourne Out Loud: Life through the lens of Rennie Ellis, State Library Victoria
Trocadero Projects has existed as a pop-up gallery without a home for several years, producing some of Melbourne’s most thought-provoking art. The collective’s arrival at a permanent home in Melbourne’s diverse west is cause for celebration and optimism about the revitalisation it brings to that community.
Surfacing will be displayed at Trocadero Projects until 23 March 2024 as part of Queer PHOTO Festival, Midsumma.
