Biogal

Now in its third year, the FluxusMuseum Prize for Experimental Video gathers eleven artists and collectives from a field of over 600 international applications, works chosen for their resistance to easy categorisation, their originality, visual rigour, and an uncompromising approach to the form. Installed across the old marble factory by Parikia’s yacht harbour, the exhibition runs until the end of September, with prize winners announced in mid-September. Ahead of the announcement, we catch up with each of the eleven shortlisted artists and collectives.

Among this year's shortlisted artists is Biogal, whose performance-to-camera practice moves between grief, sexuality, and domestic space, treating the family home as a site of both haunting and transformation.

Could you describe your work featuring in the Prize, and how it sits in relation to your practice more broadly?

BG: 'sucking all the knobs in the house I grew up in' is a performance-to-camera work that attempts to summon psychosexual phantoms from & within the family home; it's an uncompromising libidinal channelling of the grief that follows both sexual transition & the loss of a lover.

The work continues my exploration of grief practice as a tool of resistance; domesticity (codeword: daddy issues); & identity construction under the liberal logics of the landlady.

What is your relationship to the moving image as a medium; when did it enter your practice, and what does it let you do that other mediums don't?

BG: This is my first solo film! I've produced films of my performances & zaps before in collaboration with documenters -- a handful of which have also had screenings -- but this is my first performance-to-camera work, or rather the first time I've taken the camera into my own hands.

What I'm realising from behind the lens is that, contrary to popular belief, this doesn't inherently offer me more control; but instead what it offers is another vantage point to watch the work unfurl, which for me is always quite a surprising process. This vantage point isn't just spatial though, its temporal. As I sit in my kitchen editing the footage almost a year since its recording, a kind of time-travel is made possible, one that resists my authorial plotting & encourages instead the moving material to speak for itself across time. If the camera has afforded me more agency over my image as an artist; it's the kind of agency that only comes from stepping back and letting the work take its course. It's also all felt very bodily & very transsexual -- by that I maybe mean that my body redefines itself in relation to me & my environment when filmmaking -- I'd like to continue to explore the camera as a conduit to expanded embodiment.

Are there artists, filmmakers, or traditions outside of art you feel in dialogue with here?

BG: If 'sucking [...]' had one of those letterboxd top 4 films videos (lol) it would be: Jamie Crewe's 'Ashley' (2020); Pope. L's 'small cup' (2008); Joanna Hogg's 'Exhibition' (2013); & Nobuhiko Obiyashi's 'House' (1977) -- with a special mention of course to the licking scene in 'Pink Flamingos' (1972).

I feel there is also some resonance to the tone of Yoko Ono's instructions; the double-tongued straight-talk of Cornelia Parker; the institutional intimacy of Andrea Fraser, & I can only hope some of the razor-edge danger of P. Staff

Some people use "experimental" to mean formally unconventional, others to mean something closer to research or inquiry. Which is closer to how you're using video here?

BG: Inquiry for sure! I never have the answers & hardly find them either. Study too I suppose, in the Moten & Harney sense of the word: "When we think of study, we think of it as what you do with other people." I make work that confuses me so that I can share it with other people and feel less alone in the unknown of it. Conventions can be fun I reckon, and they're always falling apart anyway, so all more the reason to pick them up! I think it's very difficult (and expensive) to make something truly conventional in any absolutist sense.

What would you like visitors to experience when spending time with your work?

BG: I hope they feel a whole confluence of emotions: humour to horniness, despair & melancholy, fear & cringe - others too maybe? This is how it felt to make the work. I also hope some take the work instructionally as well, non-literally as a kind of permission to grieve crudely, but maybe literally too. Go suck a knob & see how it feels!

What has the support from FluxusMuseum made possible, for this piece specifically or for your practice more broadly?

BG: The support from Fluxus allowed me to finish editing the film (in quite a direct way financially when my laptop stopped working) and also has given me a nice prod to keep making films. I'm grateful also to reach an audience outside of the U.K :) thank you FluxusMusuem!

What else are you working on at the moment?

BG: I'm currently finishing a writing course with the School of Cvntology here in London, & from that have begun a long-term project adapting a 19th century novel for the screen and page. I'm also working closely with the Women's Art Library here in London to expand their catalogue of trans*sexual women artists. Right now I'm finally buying a fan to survive this heat-dome!