Rather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles.
— Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires (2005).
Across the bend of a white picket fence of Camperdown Oval is a bright and flickering fluorescent glow. The source is Impossible Desire, a solo exhibition-or should I say, screening-of new video installation works by Ali Tahayori currently projecting through the glass façade of the artist-run gallery Knulp. For the duration of the exhibition, Tahayori has transformed Knulp into a lightbox cinema (minus the popcorn) where weekly screenings are scheduled to take place during the gallery’s alternate night-time opening hours of Friday and Saturday between five and eight o’clock. And if you’re lucky like I was, you’ll happen to experience Impossible Desire as a private screening, complete with direct insights from the artist himself.
June Miskell is a writer living on unceded Gadigal and Wangal land. She teaches at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney where she is currently undertaking her PhD.
