West Space presents emerging artist Thang Do in the West Space Window as part of To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer/Migrant Time.

Curated by Aziz Sohail, this exhibition explores the intersections of migrant time and queer time, reflecting on concepts of temporal maladjustment, disbelonging, and detachment. The project brings together international artists and artists in Australia to imagine new networks and intimacies.

Reflecting on Ranajit Guha's meditation on the migrant condition as not just about belonging/disbelonging but also 'temporal maladjustment' which occurs due to the rupture of one's own past (homeland) and present (settler land), this concept is complicated by the concept of queer time. As articulated by Jack Halberstam 'alternative temporalities' can be developed outside of logics of 'paradigmatic markers of life experience namely birth, marriage, reproduction and death.'

How can we then locate queer migrant condition an experience that doubly complicates the notion of time and the affective relations and intimacies that unfold from it. How may we imagine disbelonging and detachment through both these experiences? How do we consider networks and friendship found and fostered, in order to be made possible anew?

British-Somali poet Momtaza Mehri writes, Diaspora is durational loss / We keep moving and moving and moving / We never arrive. This project embodies Ebb and Flow as two interlinked halves not just gesturing to circularity (as opposed to linearity), but also to conditions of withdrawal, retreat, departure, opacity and gesturing to the past i.e. to ebb and visibility, movement, advancement, arrival and gesturing to the future, or to flow. There is a recognition to move beyond the binaries between the two, understanding that both co-exist simultaneously.

Press release courtesy West Space.