Don’t Forget to Remember is an experimental drawing performance by Todd Fuller that explores the fragile relationship between presence and disappearance, while considering the backdrop of Australia’s difficult histories of violence against the LGBTIQ community, and in particular gay and trans men at Australian beats.
Working directly on the gallery wall, Fuller creates and unravels a simple image through a sequence of physical actions, using his body as both tool and subject.
Don’t Forget to Remember opens space to consider how memory is held, erased, and reshaped, while drawing attention to sites of violence and their lingering presence in everyday environments. It is both an ode and a eulogy to lives lost, a quiet act of witness and forgetting that asks us to look back, learn from the past, and commit to the labour of remembering.
Exhibition opening and performance – Thursday 2 July, 6pm. Performance begins from 6.30pm.
Exhibition runs 3-4 July, 11am-5pm daily
ALL TICKETS HAVE NOW BEEN SOLD.
Please come along from 7pm to celebrate with the artist and see a recording of the performance.
Todd is represented by .M Contemporary, Sydney.
Click to download a pdf copy of the exhibition room sheet.
Todd Fuller, Don't forget to remember (rehearsal documentation), 2026,
drawing performance, 8:52 minutes, courtesy the artist.
Bio
With a practice that integrates sculpture, moving image, performance and painting, Sydney-based artist Todd Fuller is, at his core, a draughtsman. Underpinning all aspects of his practice is a commitment to drawing as a democratic medium that connects, engages and delights audiences.
For more than a fifteen years, Fuller has been developing hand-drawn animations that explore love and loss, alongside ideas of place, identity and community. These often narrative works are grounded in lived experience and developed through engagement with different communities, sites and histories, including an increasing thread of queer histories and speculative storytelling that reconsiders overlooked or fragmented narratives. His award-winning practice has been shaped through residencies at Bundanon Trust, Hill End, Grafton Regional Art Gallery, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the British School at Rome, and the NG Creative Residency in Provence.
A graduate of Sydney’s National Art School, Fuller has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. He was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman and Dobell Prizes, won the 2018 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, and was awarded the 2024 Sunshine Coast National Art Prize. His work is held in public and private collections including Parliament House Art Collection, Artbank, Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, State Library of New South Wales, Museum of Brisbane, Sydney Museum and numerous regional galleries. He has exhibited in the United States, Italy, France, South Korea, Bangladesh, England, Singapore and Malta.
Fuller’s practice also extends into curatorship and arts production, with roles across Waverley Council, the Biennale of Sydney, Sculpture in the Vineyards and dLux Media Arts. His curatorial work often reflects the same concerns as his studio practice, particularly drawing, storytelling and contemporary approaches to visual narrative.
Don’t Forget to Remember: Todd Fuller
Exhibition essay by Elizabeth Reidy
Todd Fuller is an exquisite artist and draughtsman. Expanding on his well-known oeuvre and drawing as a democratic medium, Don’t Forget to Remember presents an 8-minute performance incorporating large-scale wall drawing, gestural movement, and a politically charged soundscape that examines LGBTIQ+ social issues, commencing with the drawing of a park bench.
Park benches are democratic cradles. Often adorned with memorialisation plaques acknowledging those no longer with us, a park bench is a powerful symbol of remembrance, appreciation of beauty, and the value of shared life experiences. Designed with the purpose of enhancing community connection while simultaneously providing space for pause, reprieve, solitude and reflection, a park bench provides an open invitation to stop, breathe, and regroup. They are romantic and romanticised meeting points, intentionally and unintentionally, where social barriers between strangers are broken down. Parks benches, and parks more broadly are also sites of incredible violence for the LGBTIQ+ community. The allure of a safe meeting point has one to many times become a site of inexplicable unsolicited violence.
There is a horrific canon of little discussed gay hate crimes in recent Australian History. In December 2023 The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ + hate crimes and historical violence released landmark findings into the unsolved assaults and deaths of 32 LGBTIQ+ identifying people between 1970 – 2010 in New South Wales alone. The report examined social and cultural factors affecting the LGBTIQ+ community, including institutional discrimination and police negligence and neglect. The systematic attacks were yielded by groups of thugs targeting known beats and setting upon people in parks. Marks Park, Tamarama, perhaps best known today as the home of Sculpture by the Sea, was the location of at least four homicides and countless violent assaults passed off as suicides or ignored due to gender and sexuality identification on the part of the victims. These attacks were documented in journalist Greg Callahan’s Bondi Badlands (pub 2007, Allen and Unwin) and in the subsequent podcast of the same name, released in 2022. One victim, a Thai National named Kritichikorn Rattanajurathaporn, was set upon by a group of teenagers while sitting peacefully on a park beach overlooking the majestic oceanic headland. He was attacked by three young men with a hammer and thrown over the cliff. His death was a heinous, unprovoked and targeted attack. His body was found in the rocks beneath the cliffs of Marks Park two days after his death by police divers. Rattanajurathaporn’s murder was in 1990.
In March 2026 the NSW State Parliament tabled the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill in response to a resurgence of anti LGBTIQ violence. Introduced via the Legislative Assembly by the attorney general of NSW, Michael Daley, Maroubra, the Bill is an amendment to the Crimes Act 1900 in relation to hate crimes, and for related purposes. The proposed amended laws target offenders who lure victims via the use of dating apps and increase penalties for those engaging in hate speech, public threats or inciting targeted violence of any form against LGBTIQ identifying people. Daley’s speech to Parliament forms the soundtrack to Fuller’s performance. It is a speech that forms a powerful and intense soundtrack, and there is little nuance in the message. LGBTIQ+ Hate crimes are on the rise and, yet again, despite the long and dedicated struggles of many for equality, despite the success of the Plebiscite for Same Sex Marriage in 2017, despite the feats of the 78’s to protest the right to love, despite the celebrated cultural staple of Sydney Mardi Gras that followed, despite the findings of The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crime 2023 and Sydney World Pride 2023 - the undertow of hatred and discrimination is back on the climb.
Performance Dramaturgy
SOUNDTRACK:
Fuller draws his first line on the wall.
The line extends to another then another.
A park bench is drawn
CITE: A space to sit, reflect and contemplate.
Fuller tries to sit.
The park bench doesn’t function.
He tries again, and again.
With choreographed gestures, he falters, he slips, he falls.
The park bench is a beautiful image: reflect, remember.
Fuller regroups repeatedly.
SOUNDTRACK: Daley’s speech becomes inaudible, words over words.
Fuller sits on the floor
Fuller walks away.
SILENCE
The park bench remains – a beautiful image
SILENCE ECHOS; Don’t forget to Remember.
Click to download a pdf copy of the exhibition essay.