Sweatmother seeks to create art for his community to share, learn from and find solace in sensitive depictions of their shared raw realities and obscured histories.
Sweatmother is an artist and filmmaker based in London. His moving image work blends performance, self-recorded documentation, internet and archival text/footage in order to explore and make visible queer lived experiences. Experimental techniques are often incorporated throughout his work such as the triple baked method, an original image making technique using a video synthesizer.
His film, Untitled, was selected as part of the Official Competition Oberhausen 69th Film Festival and placed 1st Prize Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. In November 2024, he premiered his first solo expanded cinema performance, Dyke Just Do It, with two sold out shows at the ICA in London.
Sweat is the founder of Otherness Archive, a digital archive documenting queer films and its pioneers. In April 2024 he will debut his Protest Documentations (2018-2023) at the invitation of the Biennale Arte 2024 curated by Adriano Pedrosa (Venice, Italy).
Dyke, Just Do It
HD Video / 60:00 min / 2023
Dyke, Just Do It (2023) is a live expanded cinema performance focusing on modes of dyke counternarratives and desire. It is a live and immersive experience with intergenerational performers and the screening of video work, with live visual manipulation of historical archive footage, filmed footage and commercial adverts.
The performance reflects on dyke representation in capitalist contexts, and how these can be co-opted and reclaimed into new realms of desire. Through a process of repurposing found footage and reworking archival text, pride slogans and advert taglines the piece explores how dyke culture can transform itself and overcome its assimilation into heteronormative modes of representation and censorship.