Ridiculousness doesn’t kill, quite the contrary. Hilary Galbreaith uses slapstick and amateurism as critical and political weapons. The artist is part of an artistic heritage in which an experimental underground hybridizes with punk, feminist and queer cultures. Their protean works, at the crossroads of installation, painting, writing and sound, manifest a liminal, fluid, deliberately troubled and necessarily non-binary way of thinking. The artist’s aim is to dismantle systems of power - one after the other. Aware of the interweaving nature of these systems (racism, sexism, classicism, colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity, fascism, necropolitics, patriarchy, etc.), Hilary Galbreaith makes the mechanisms […]
Ridiculousness doesn’t kill, quite the contrary. Hilary Galbreaith uses slapstick and amateurism
as critical and political weapons. The artist is part of an artistic heritage in which an experimental underground hybridizes with punk, feminist and queer cultures. Their protean works, at the crossroads of installation, painting, writing and sound, manifest a liminal, fluid, deliberately troubled and necessarily non-binary way of thinking. The artist’s aim is to dismantle systems of power - one after the other. Aware of the interweaving nature of these systems (racism, sexism, classicism, colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity, fascism, necropolitics, patriarchy, etc.), Hilary Galbreaith makes the mechanisms and workings of these ideological machines visible in a joyful, intersectional way.
The artist develops experimental documentaries in which video, performance (notably the staging of their self and of the communities involved) and installation enable them to combine reality and fiction. Experimental documentary is a territory without borders, norms or rules. Hilary Galbreaith’s projects are based on documented stories and events, while infiltrating other narrative forms such as (science) fiction and auto-fiction. They write: “In recent years, the acceleration of climate change, warmongering and the frightening rise of the far right in many countries both in Europe and America have led me to question the predominant role of SF fabulation in my work. Nothing I could invent seems stranger or more relevant than what is currently happening to our planet.” By making visible and de-silencing stories considered minor, Hilary Galbreaith shatters the dominant narrative by introducing feminist, queer, decolonial, ecological and classist struggles. With a firm determination to de-hierarchize earthly communities, they embrace human and more-than-human relationships, filling the bodies of those who refuse to be confined to minorities, binarities and assignments with joy, dignity and pride. The artist turns the founding myths of the dominant narrative - a powerful generator of alienation, oppression and death - on their heads, to sing, represent, embody and propagate other models of identification, other ways of living, other ways of seeing, tasting, thinking, making society, being in the world - joyfully - horizontally - bizarrely – collectively.
Julie Crenn, 2024