DANIEL JOHN CORBETT SANDERS (b.1994) is a Taranaki Pākehā multidisciplinary artist and independent curator. His work investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life.
Around the world there has been an increasing pressure on LGBTQ+ venues to shut their doors, such as gay bars, sex stores, cruise clubs and community centres. Amongst many reasons, this increasing pressure is due to cuts in governmental funding, rising rents and a cultural sterilising consequential of gentrification processes. As a gay sex worker in Tāmaki Makaurau, I have witnessed similar tensions and devastating, destructive and demoralising consequences that new urban developments have had on LGBTQ+ venues and cultures. Recognising this global crisis for LGBTQ+ people and cultures, my work seeks to document how LGBTQ+ cultures are responding to these changes through recording my personal experiences and interaction with them. From the fossils and ruins of a nostalgic sexual liberation and ideas of radical love, to the fetishistic dreams that wish to carve out a queer future but are subsumed by colonial homonationalism, my work sifts through LGBTQ+ cultures and all their contradictory dreams and catastrophes in pursuit of what queerness means today.
Recent exhibition include Urban Nothing (RM Gallery, Auckland, 2021); Queer Pavilion (Rangipuke Albert Park, Auckland, 2020); and Intimate Atmospheres (Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland, 2019).
Sanders studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology and is the founder of artist-run gallery Parasite.
A singer with gold nail polish, eye shadow, and a rainbow lei, serenades the camera.
Dance music plays from an unseen source as a mop, filmed vertiginously from above, cleans a concrete floor.
The image of a young man in central Auckland is leant a phantasmagorical element by the rotation of the camera.