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JD Reforma – AGNSW Acquisition

By Sotiris Sotiriou on April 28, 2022

JD Reforma’s ‘I want to believe’ has recently been acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

‘I want to believe’ is a work about faith and hope that creates a direct, physical relationship between the domestic and the cosmic.

It consists of a filmed performance that took place on the rooftop of the artist’s apartment building in inner-city Sydney amidst the 2020 lockdown, in which he uses his body and the accumulated rooftop grime to write and re-write the phrase ‘I want to believe, I want to leave’. Developing this performance, the artist had been reflecting about people confined with abusers, reflecting on his last relationship and how he might have navigated a lockdown. The phrase ‘I want to believe’ is sampled from a poster of a UFO featured in the classic science fiction television show X-Files; the artist had once intended to purchase a replica of this poster as a birthday gift for his former partner-turned-abuser.

Precarity is threaded through all accounts of intimate partner violence; people surviving at the thresholds of love and fear, hope and doubt. In choosing to film on his rooftop, the artist embraces the liminal – a boundary between home and the heavens, confinement and escape, doubt and deliverance. Writing becomes an embodied, broadcast performance, articulating a choreography of control in which hope is harm, and signs are sirens.

In this sense, a UFO could be interpreted as an unidentified ‘faith’ object, and ‘I want to believe’ as a kind of invocation, prayer or plea.

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