Other together

14 March - 18 April 2025

Alice McCool and Ena Grozdanić

Sawtooth ARI , Launceston TAS

“To love a friend is to recognise the difference and estrangement of the other. Friendly love, which is based on asymmetrical reciprocity, demands the recognition of the foreignness at the core of intimacy.” — Svetlana Boym

Friendship is a rich thematic field for both cultural and political analysis, offering a way of thinking about bonds between persons and the transformative potential such bonds can carry. Though friendship is a relation commonly entered into, suffusing everyday life with a joyful texture, the effect/affects of friendship are often overlooked and under-examined.

In ‘Other together,’ we look to friendship as a position of shared vulnerability, recognising ‘comradely love’ as a basis for collective solidarity. Activated from a ground of estrangement, by recognising the stranger as a friend, we consider personal and political notions of affiliation.

‘Other together’ attempts to slip friendship into the centre of cultural analysis, addressing new forms of agency and identity mobilised by the process of collaborative production between friends: friendship is a way of being free in the world, of preferring encounter to resolution, of sharing, extending, co-constituting.

Images credit: Installation view. ‘Other together’, exhibition at Sawtooth ARI, 2025. Photography by Yusuf Ali Hayat.