Interview Benjamin Sebastian on Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light at VSSL in Deptford
We caught up with artist Benjamin Sebastian to talk about new digital collage and textile works, soft sculpture and installation, as well as performance art documentation & relics featured in the new exhibition at VSSL studio in Deptford.
Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light | 31 January-28 February 2025 | VSSL studio, Deptford | Free
Tell us about your new exhibition Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light and how it came about.
Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light was commissioned by Arts Council England as a touring exhibition that spans a decade of my practice, bringing together older works alongside newly created pieces. The exhibition stems from my ongoing exploration of intersectional hybridity, world-building, and the tension between colonial imposition and decolonial imaginaries. It features sewn textile collages, soft sculptures, installations, and performance documentation.
At the heart of the exhibition is a large-scale installation comprising diamond-shaped fragments of a seven-pointed star – an esoteric and political symbol – encircled by three soft sculptural ‘Entities’ with ambiguous, nonbinary forms.
I am particularly interested in how art can function as an occult technology, operating at the intersection of decolonial, nonbinary, and neurodiverse modes of world-building. The fragmented star and sentinel-like figures evoke a sense of both protection and haunting, confronting personal and collective specters of coloniality. This body of work reflects my desire to unpack my own experiences of nonbinary and neurodivergent subjectivities, as well as my settler-colonial heritage, transforming personal narratives into a visual language that interrogates the complex systems of coloniality shaping all our lives.
What are your inspirations and influences for creating the exhibition?
The exhibition is deeply inspired by occult practices, colonial history, personal neurodivergent methodologies, and queer subjectivities. My art-making functions as both practical magic and a form of queer/neurodivergent world-building – a process of manifesting the yet-to-be into being.
Jason Louv’s John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World significantly influenced the development of the newer works, particularly the fragmented star installation entitled Undoing Dee’s Work. Louv’s exploration of John Dee’s role in British imperial expansion underscores how colonial structures are rooted in both physical and occult power – much like Undoing Dee’s Work, which is both visual art installation as well as a process of ritual magic.
My lived experience as a neurodivergent, nonbinary artist also shaped this exhibition. For me, language and form often collapse into fluid, hybrid expressions, reflected in the three ‘Entities’ surrounding the deconstructed star. These figures are not fixed symbols but amalgamated, ambiguous forms that invite reflection on memory, hybridity, grief, protection and the holding of space. Ultimately, I want to foster more open dialogues around various forms of coloniality that affect each and everyone one of us in our daily lives.
What are your favourite London haunts?
I live East in Clapton, very close to Hackney and Walthamstow Marshes, so to relax I spend a lot of time hanging out here, walking through the marshes and wetlands with my partner and dog – I became sober a few years back so my lifestyle changed quite dramatically. I now really enjoy working out at two of the local gyms around here. I like being active. As cliche as it sounds, walking, swimming, working out in the gym, these are all active types of meditation for me and really put my mind at ease.
I love what I do, so I spend a lot of my free time making things, either at home, online or in the studio. I also love to see what other artists and curators are up to so I take in alot of exhibitions. Some of my favourite galleries at the moment are Gathering, Raven Row, Camden Arts Centre, Sprüth Magers, Guts Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ and Auto Italia. I also love to check in on VSSL Studio’s neighbours; Plicnik Space Initiative, studio/chapple, Xxijra Hii and Lake, on Resolution Way in Deptford as they each consistently offer great exhibition programmes.
When it comes to food I am a creature of habit and comfort. There are a few local places I haunt like Sodo and Vesuvio (pizza) and Venetias (breakfasts), as well as a cute little Thai place in Kings Cross called Paolina Thai Cafe. I also love a dive/rock bar so Helgi’s and Blondies are a good fit for me.
Meet Benjamin Sebastian in a Q&A with Joseph Morgan Schofield on Thursday 13 February 2025. Book tickets here
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like free, cheap & offbeat London, especially: cabaret, art, theatre, pop-ups, eating out, quirky films, museums, day trips, social enterprise & much more.
