The Midnight Shift

Background: The research is grounded in radical homosexual (LGBTIQ+) politics, histories and narratives and how they are represented and memorialised through a “lens-based practice”. It asks: How have radical spaces that have proliferated the development of LGBTIQ+ histories & narratives memorialise homosexual spatial practices as it encounters erasure and systemic integration? Relevant artists include David McDiarmid, Mathew Jones, Andreas Angelidakis, Angelo Plessas, Elmgreen & Dragset, Robert Maplethorpe, Ray Cook, and Carlos Motta. Influential theorists include Leo Bersani (homosexuality as being of the same “homo” and separate from queer theory); David Getzy (abstraction as being a queering of the body queer); and Jack Halberstam (architecture as metaphor for a body). Contribution: As the director, writer, producer, researcher and editor of the video The Midnight Shift, I explored ways of memorialising the radical sites that have contributed to homosexual narratives and histories. ‘The Midnight Shift’ is now a demolished gay club in Sydney (a once gay capital in the world). The video is an animation of archival material that I discovered on radical homosexual practices from architecture, painting, photography, performance and advertising. The work traces homosexuality as being, and increasingly becoming, an invisible history. It contributes to monuments and memorialisation through a lens-based practice, using memory, relational, dialogical and archival processes framed by digital technologies. The work responds to the national and international conversation with urgency to memorialise invisible homosexual sites that are vanishing. Significance: The work was commissioned by UNSW Galleries for its major exhibition ‘Friendship as a way of life.’ Curated by the Gallery Director José Da Silva and Deputy Director Kelly Doley, it featured more than 20 artists including ALOK, Camilo Godoy, and Gavin Kirkness and the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt project.