Cartographies of otherness

Disappearing borders, reconstructed national flags and performances that leave no trace: three artists challenge the systems that shape identity and belonging. Cartographies of otherness brings together Benjamin Sebastian, Vaida Tamoševičiūtė and Mauricio Esquivel to explore how coloniality moves through bodies, identities and lived experiences, and how inherited systems of power might be challenged and transformed. Through installation, textiles, sculpture, live performance and performance documentation, the artists examine otherness not as an inherent condition but as something produced through political, social and cultural structures. Vaida Tamoševičiūtė explores feelings of shame and guilt, socially imposed norms, and relationships between people, places, and personal experiences. Through a minimal sculptural intervention, she opens the space of her artwork to invited performers. Her relationships with peers, friends, and students form an evolving network that makes curating inseparable from her artistic practice. Mauricio Esquivel investigates the political and ecological systems through which borders, identities, and hierarchies are constructed. Through interventions upon the body, including a tattooed boundary that gradually disappears, he questions the permanence of imposed divisions. His practice also explores tensions between technological progress, ecological interdependence, and ancestral knowledge, revealing the fragility of systems that seek to separate humanity from the natural world. Benjamin Sebastian examines how coloniality shapes their experiences as a queer, autistic, disabled British settler Australian. Through dismantled and reconstructed national flags, homoerotic hybrid figures, and ritual performances exploring destruction, transformation, and renewal, they interrogate inherited systems of power. Their practice draws upon neurodivergent ways of knowing to create new symbolic languages through which identity, belonging, and otherness might be reconsidered. Together, the three artists explore how established systems might be dismantled, rewritten and transformed, opening possibilities for other ways of knowing, relating and belonging. In the exhibition co-curated by Tamoševičiūtė and Sebastian, artist-led curation becomes a decolonial practice in which lived experiences are recognised as sovereign sources of knowledge, independent of traditional institutional hierarchies.