The present is not enough – as long as people outside of cis and heteronormative structures are still arrested, persecuted and killed. Queerness can be understood as a vision for the future. The time to come will be determined by its people and their actions, which are already showing today the potential for a queer future.1

In 2019, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin staged ‘The Present is Not Enough’, an expansive festival curated by Ricardo Carmona, comprising an exhibition, installations, performances, theatre and music addressing queer temporality. Timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall riots in 2019 and the centenary of the Institute for Sexual Research, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919. Stonewall, in particular, points to a moment in history that represents the emergence of LGBTQIA+ political and sexual freedoms in the western world, yet systemic homo- and transphobic oppression and violence the world over remains to this day.

Rolling with decade-ism as an opportunity to signpost the cultural milestones of linear time, another recent queer anniversary is worth mentioning here. The year 2021 marked the thirtieth birthday of scholar Teresa de Lauretis coining the term ‘queer theory’ in her guest-edited issue of the feminist journal differences.2 In large part, the emergence of contemporary queer studies – and the reclamation of ‘queer’ from its pejorative origins – owes a great debt to De Lauretis. Today, queer has come to be an all-encompassing designator of LGBTQIA+ identity, pervasive and commonplace, banal in the best possible way.

Certainly, ‘the present is not enough’ resonates powerfully in Australia if we consider the voracious appetite for ‘archive fever’ dominating the festival programming for Sydney WorldPride in 2023. A significant proportion of the program included exhibitions surveying the visual culture of our recent histories. Notable was the intersection of artistic and documentary expression spread through multiple exhibitions, performances and events, including among others, photographers William Yang and C. Moore Hardy. Their inclusion in several exhibitions, including ‘THE PARTY’ at UNSW Galleries, attests to the important contribution they have made by simply having been there, camera in hand, to document the otherwise ephemeral rhythms of nocturnal queer party culture. Blurring art and social history, this astonishing time capsule curated by José Da Silva and Nick Henderson was an invitation to re-witness a radical past in an ever more conservative and gentrified present.

Other recent examples to foreground queer thinking in the museum include ‘Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection’ (2022), a sprawling jaunt through time and space via more than 400 works from the institution’s holdings. With an aim to ‘look queerly’ at the collection rather than attempt to address the limitless dimensions of queer lived experience, the exhibition asked: ‘how does the institution reveal, celebrate, or omit the queer stories behind the art in its collection in a new light?’3 The act of bringing to light as a means of filling the gaps of Australia’s rich queer art archive is evident in the activities undertaken by a working group of researchers called KINK, who were:

borne out of a desire to create a platform dedicated to the rich history of queer Australian art in all its varied forms. One method of combatting the issues outlined here – and it is perhaps one of the most common in the diverse field of queer theory – is to pay attention to gaps: attending not to what is in the archive, but to what has been left out.4

Sitting at the nexus of research and museology, Australia’s university art museums have contributed much to this national discourse, with recent presentations such as ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (UNSW Galleries, 2020), Drew Pettifer’s ‘A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk’ (Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2020), and Madison Bycroft's BIOPIC (Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, 2021) further complicating the picture. 

This year sees survey presentations of the work of Paul Knight at Monash University Museum of Art (followed by UNSW Galleries in 2024) and Troy-Anthony Baylis at QUT Art Museum that will further test queer thinking within a museum context.5 United thematically around ideas of love, their varied conceptual practices contribute to the growing groundswell of queerly curated museum offerings in Australia.

Alongside textile and machine-learning works, and central to Knight’s exhibition ‘L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow)’, curated by Pip Wallis, is the photo series ‘Chamber Music’. When Knight met his partner Peter in 2009, a camera was witness to their first date, setting in motion a record of their relationship as an index of time, not as a linear progression, but as volume: ‘There are hundreds of these images, and the accumulation they represent in terms of space and the spaces depicted in the photographs is important in connecting with how memory works and how it takes up space in a life.’6

Knight regards these pictures as an intensely focused study of their intimate proximity as a couple. Both men, as each other’s erotic shadow (to echo the poetic doubling of the exhibition title), render the domestic and sexual configurations of their queer existence as beautifully matter-of-fact. Politically, Knight’s images point out the banality of human care, intimacy and relationships when the filter of heteronormative thinking is removed from the frame.

If queerness is ‘a vision for the future’, to return to Carmona’s proposition in ‘The Present is Not Enough’, then what of the future if we see time as volume? Within Knight’s own container for living is a zone for love to fashion human consciousness, being and becoming. There is the here and now of the spaces we inhabit, cast against the limitless expanse of cosmological space and time. We can only aspire to queer futurity if we survive together through care and love:

Shot in a vernacular style on 35-mm film, ‘Chamber Music’ is a kind of distant cousin to Nan Goldin’s more communal diary of her queer life and times, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–96). Staged as a slide show, Goldin timestamps her images to a soundtrack of popular songs that heighten the poetry and pathos of her imagery.8 Similarly, Knight creates an implied soundtrack to ‘Chamber Music’ through its title, referencing this form of composition as a metaphor for the intense ‘chamber’ existing as an expression of adoration between two people to the exclusion of society.

Riffing on the song by The Stone Roses, ‘I wanna be adorned’ by Troy-Anthony Baylis is less the chamber of Knight’s intimate universe than a queer pop Wunderkammer bursting at the seams with love expressed as fandom. As with recent presentations at the Art Gallery of South Australia (‘Nomenclatures’, 2020) and Hugo Michell Gallery for Tarnanthi (‘Yes, I am Musical’, 2021), Baylis playfully bristles, gently and humorously prodding at language and visual culture through the resonances of popular music. With declarative statements and sharp wordplay, Baylis mines his vast musical knowledge to carry forward queer culture and experience.

Though he works across multiple forms of media, ‘I wanna be adorned’ brings together five bodies of work exclusively in textile. Baylis, who is of Jawoyn descent with Irish ancestry, rethinks colonial notions of gender, sexuality and indigeneity through work that finds ways to create queer puns from its cultural and material properties as much as from the linguistic:

‘Two Hearts’ is a new series for this exhibition curated by Vanessa Van Ooyen. Taking the form of appliquéd heart bouquets, the works are deliberately sentimental – ‘where even the most tragic is romantic,’ he quips.10 Two paintings of hearts are woven together and adorned with four-holed buttons that have been applied with embroidery thread, resulting in each button being secured with an X-shaped ‘kiss’ motif. In the process of referencing several songs by artists including Kylie Minogue and Prince, Baylis connects the pop culture of his lifetime to the ongoing traditions and custodianship of his Indigenous ancestry. Puns on Aboriginal Songlines and non-Aboriginal ‘song lines’ coalesce for Baylis to reflect and ramp up the volume on the ‘mixed ethnographies, mixed geographies, and mixed appearances’ of love and sexuality in a tense present.11

Survey exhibitions are markers of time and an opportunity for artists (and their audiences) to look back on their respective oeuvres to move onward. Both esteemed mid-career practitioners, Knight and Baylis offer diverse propositions for queer futurity based on love as a framework of ethics as much as feeling. With Tomorrow (2009), Baylis quotes the popular song from Annie, the 1977 stage musical turned 1982 film, as text adorned on a series of knitted Dilly Bags, offering hope through a queering of Indigenous matriarchal traditions. Primarily designed and used by Aboriginal women to gather food for survival and care, the bags are vessels representing sustenance. Here, they are containers for the queering of voluminous time that rises as meaning is measured and carried forward.

This is the first in a new series of essays sponsored by University Art Museums Australia (UAMA), a membership organisation for advocacy and research, that will commission writers to explore themes and foster dialogue around Australia’s university art museum sector.