How do you compose kin? In the photographs of a found, leather-bound family photo-album that form Responsibilities to time 2019, Callum McGrath has replaced images of birthdays or holidays with pictures of queer memorials and spaces of celebration. These substitutions show how kinship can be constructed by nurturing one’s family of choice rather than by biological lineage. Further, the artist undercuts the notion of linear history that is normally displayed within a family album by presenting the memorials in non-chronological order.
At a moment when historic public monuments of former leaders and figureheads are highly contested, McGrath looks at how personal stories are often lost through the process of distilling the complexity of history into a sculpture. His use of amateur photography acknowledges that uncovering the past is often an intuitive process that necessitates reading between the lines of archives or searching within unofficial sources. Responsibilities to time shows how LGBTQIA+ memories, by the virtue of being queer, necessitate unconventional approaches to archival organisation.
