Callum McGrath

22 — 24 May 2020

Thoughts & Prayers presents a new two-channel video installation and photographic series. The exhibition follows the aesthetic trajectory of memorialisation and a de-linear reorganisation of queer protest. Organised around two memorials - the Frankfurter Engel and Buchenwald Memorial to all Inmates – the project questions the sentiment of public memorials and the ongoing destabilisation of queer politics globally. Mediated through archival video footage this project highlights the cyclical nature of history and critiques the role remembrance plays in that process.

Callum McGrath is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist who produces research-driven video, installation, images, text, sound, and sculpture that reimagine institutionalised aesthetics and functions of archives and historiography. Interested in the erosion of time and cultural memory, McGrath’s video, photographic, and sculptural practice is placed in a dialogue with installation-based environments to describe how a queer lens can help us negotiate our relationship to the past. McGrath has been featured in various solo and group exhibitions including: Responsibilities to Time, Boxcopy, Brisbane (2019); Toro, Milani CARPARK (2019); Queer Economies, Bus Projects and Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2019); POOFTA, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2018); Cross-mending, Outer Space, Brisbane (2018); River Torrens, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); Passing, West Space, Melbourne (2017); and HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth (2017); McGrath obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) with first class Honours at the Queensland University of Technology (2016). In 2019 McGrath was awarded the The Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship.

Accompanying text by Chelsea Hopper.