Don’t Forget to Remember
GAG members recently gathered for a powerful and unusually intimate performance of Don’t Forget to Remember by artist Todd Fuller.
Part drawing, part performance and part act of remembrance, the work explores the fragile space between presence and disappearance. Working directly onto the gallery walls, Fuller uses charcoal, movement and his own body to create an image only to gradually alter, obscure and unravel it before the audience.
At the heart of the work is a much more difficult history.
Don’t Forget to Remember reflects upon violence against Australia’s LGBTIQ community, particularly gay and trans men, and the histories attached to Australian beats — places that could represent freedom, connection and community, but which could also become sites of persecution and violence.
Fuller’s performance resists turning those histories into something fixed or comfortably memorialised. Instead, the repeated acts of drawing and erasure make memory itself feel precarious. Marks appear, disappear and leave traces behind. The body becomes both the maker of the work and part of what is being remembered.
For the GAG members who attended, there was something particularly affecting about experiencing the work collectively. We began as a gallery audience, gathered around an artist making a drawing, but gradually became witnesses to the process of its making and unmaking.
That distinction felt important.
Remembering is not passive. Histories can fade when they are no longer spoken about, places can lose their associations, and lives can disappear from collective memory. Don’t Forget to Remember asks us to resist that disappearance — not simply by looking backwards, but by recognising that remembering requires continuing effort.
By the end, what remained was not simply an image on a wall, but the evidence of an action: charcoal, traces, gestures and the memory of having watched it happen.
Both ode and eulogy, Fuller’s work offered a quiet but deeply resonant reminder that queer history is not only something preserved in archives and memorials. Sometimes it survives because people gather together, bear witness, tell the stories again — and choose not to forget.
Thank you to Todd Fuller for an extraordinarily thoughtful and moving performance, and to all the GAG members who joined us to experience it together.
