138 Lygon St, Brunswick East, 3057 VIC, AustraliaInformation Index
Shop Exhibition 20 March – 30 March 2025The Other Symptoms, Claudia Saballa Hobbs
The Other Symptoms navigates photography’s illusionary impetus; as a medium that imposes fantasies of stability in an otherwise disorientating world. Drawing upon Vilém Flusser's assertion that photographs are ‘symptoms of the world,’ Claudia Saballa Hobbs’ compulsive photographic practice explores the intimacy and estrangement inherent to the photographic act. Through moving image, photographic paste-ups, and a book of derivative text disguised as poetry, Saballa Hobbs plays with photography’s dual capacity to create representations of vulnerability and ‘truth’, whilst denying its maker either. Grappling with this conflict, The Other Symptoms evolves as a container and excavator of longing, loss, love and lack. Saballa Hobbs draws inspiration from Clarice Lispector’s protagonist in The Passion According to G.H. (1964), who braces her own hand as she falls into ‘the enormous absence of form that is sleep’. Self-imposing this brace upon their own body, Saballa Hobbs negotiates what might get in the way when we can’t let go. The Other Symptoms is a public and reluctant declaration of love to photography, once more hoping that it may fulfill an insatiable desire.

Claudia Saballa Hobbs (she/they) is an artist making and living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri peoples in Naarm. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2021 and received the Fiona Myer Award in their graduating year. They have participated in, and coordinated numerous projects, exhibitions, and film screenings in Naarm, at spaces including BLINDSIDE, George Paton Gallery, Woven Projects, The Substation, TCB, and Dogmilk Films. Their creative practice is a collection of everyday fragments—falling between photography and something else. Evolving as a mixture of humour, grief, and mundanity—Saballa Hobbs wants to share the experience of being overwhelmed by photography, by its length, duration, speed, and convoluted somethings. Collecting and connecting memories of the past and present, ruminations can be fleeting before moving to the next. Among it all, perhaps there are things that can be seen, picked out and held onto, sort of like photographs.




Open Weekdays 2-6pm, Weekends 12-6pm as per shop exhibition dates