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POOFTA by Callum McGrath was a heartbreakingly beautiful exhibition.
The word ‘poofta’ is grating. It is an angry label, marking one as different, perverse and vulnerable. As the word rattles around my head and takes shape on my lips, it seems that the intention of the word is physically present in the shape required to say it. While inviting a friend to the opening, I casually skipped over the exhibition’s title. Exhibition spaces, on the other hand, are suited to contemplation. They hope for us to linger, offering a space for new encounters and complex emotional responses. The jarring inconsistency between those two elements—person and place; violence and tranquility; condescension and reverence—sits at the heart of McGrath’s exhibition.
The exhibition opens with a series of photographs of the artist’s father playing rugby. Handwritten capslock captions suggest the photos’ scrapbook origins. Cropped, washed in delicate rose pink and printed onto exposed aluminium, the works heighten the striped lines of the backing paper, like and distinctly unlike the stripes of sports club uniforms. The pink hue is almost exactly the same as chosen by a collective of women in 1976 for the first cover of Lip: A feminist arts journal (1976–84). The shimmering photographs also recall Vivienne Binns’s and collaborators’ Experiments in Vitreous Enamel, an exhibition similarly concerned with exploring identity via (matrilineal) photographic histories.1POOFTA offers a parallel recovery of colours, textures and techniques, here in the service of marginalised and violent queer experiences.
Pink is the overwhelming feature of the exhibition. Around the corner in a hallway erected for the exhibition, McGrath installed two perspex windows: one overlayed the pre-existing window to the left and the other was