Announcing the Artists: William Britten

William Britten

Queer Dialectics

William Britten's work is the product of his private altruistic sperm donation endeavor. While attempting to generate a dialectical project on the assumed innate infertility of the queer community and reconfigure the idea of a family through his practice, his work, however, took a turn and adopted further meaning in the aftermath of miscarriage. Tackling notions of the self, and definitions of genealogy, Britten suggests the child's existence lies in the hyperreal, the subject is simulated on the screen, or in the muffled audio of a heartbeat, yet has no physical form. His interpretation of the commercialisation of fertility and in critique of the IVF industry he constructs a symbolic clinic, in which the faint audio documents and traces of his   

William Britten describes his work in the exhibition: 

"The reality then shimmered to and fro, with the child being biologically mine yet simultaneously not if it were ever born. Nor was I carrying the child, the only evidence I had of its existence was a murky glimpse through an ultrasound scan and a recording of its heartbeat at 178bpm. Of course, describing this work retrospectively is immeasurably different from its production. Since the miscarriage, the direction in the production of this piece found security within the hyperreal, distancing myself from the easily accessible and exploitable personal and emotional avenues, instead choosing to inhabit the space in-between, the absurd area of critique, hiding behind a proposed utopian and naive desire. This work exists as a portal, at any point anyone can pick up a transitional object [donation pot] for themselves and do the same as I did." ..."Queer Dialectics, through a criterion with the absurd, attempts to excogitate avenues of legibility through the installation and performance of a hyperreal queer fertility clinic. Pisces in Greek mythology, Winnicottian and Barthesian metaphors, and the transitional objects form a mixed media expression of a dichotomous reality, where the line between dystopian reality and utopian fantasies are irrevocably blurred."