Deborah White, Everlasting Happiness (still), 2023. HD digital video, 11:15 mins, 1 or 3 channel, looped, variable dimensions. Courtesy: the artist and Manningham Art Gallery, Melbourne.

Deborah White is a Melbourne-based artist who works across performance-based photography, video and mixed-media installations.

Everlasting Happiness entertains the utopian idea of love as a political concept. The underlying philosophy of this aspiration is to love the most distant. This is not a sentimental notion of love. It is a robust kind of love with a revolutionary power. Viewing the actions of love as a deployment of force, this work intertwines supernatural wonder with the spectacle of war.

The playful and vibrant performance-based video depicts an anarcho-mystic quest battling against the pathology of the post-truth world. Featuring fictitious characters that defy the rational world, the video is infused with flower power, music and animal warriors that open the heart to hope and joy. All the characters are performed by the artist—serving as a self-reflection on the internal struggle to love unconditionally.  This work strives for the idealistic desire of a utopian non-place of the imagination.

Sound design is by Jamie Coghill.

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