I want to believe, 2020
single-channel HD video, sound, 19 minutes 9 seconds
Production: Motel Picture Company
An Art Gallery of New South Wales Together In Art New Work 2020
Supported by the Tindale Foundation

Commissioned for Hyperlinked, 2020, curated by Isobel Parker Philip, Art Gallery of NSW

View the work on Together In Art
Review on The Saturday Paper: ‘Missing Links’ by Andy Butler

Precarity is threaded through all accounts of intimate partner violence; people surviving at the thresholds of love and fear, hope and doubt. I made this work because I’ve been thinking about people confined with abusers, reflecting on my last relationship and how I might have navigated a lockdown.

I chose to film on my rooftop because it’s a liminal space – 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.

I was going to buy him an X-Files poster for his birthday before we broke up – a blurry UFO hovering above a phrase spelled out in capital letters: I WANT TO BELIEVE.

— JD Reforma