"Undetectable" Exhibition
La MaMa La Galleria
This event has ended.
Visual AIDS presents Undetectable, a group exhibition and multi-format program curated by Nathan Lee, together with co-curator Rachel Cook. Undetectable, features works by artists in a variety of media that engage the concept of "undetectable," a word that has come to signify new developments and modes of identification in the discourse of HIV/AIDS.
In 1985, the development of an antibody test for HIV established a dichotomy in the fields of health, sexuality, and politics: the categories of “positive” and “negative.” Ten years later, the advent of combination antiretroviral treatments enabled a reduction of a body’s viral load to levels that elude conventional testing, thus inaugurating a third form of status and a new concept in biopolitics: “undetectable.” Signifying a presence that is absent, predicated on suppression and surveillance, the undetectable occupies an indeterminate space and produces new modes of connectivity, at once increasing the capacity of a body and subjecting it to a relentless regime of control.
Undetectable engages this emergent identity through a set of materials, texts, concepts, and practices concerned with presence and absence, transparency and contagion, the body and its limits. The exhibition is accompanied a publication with contributions from Andy Campbell, DUOX, Ann Lauterbach, LAMAR, and Nathan Lee.
[Image: Proposal rendering for ‘Nested Voids: The Conspiracy’, Bradley Pitts, 2012. A lit vitrine, containing an email correspondence and photos, documents the clandestine installation of an imperceptible artwork with in ‘Voids’, a retrospective of empty exhibitions. (Courtesy of the artist.)]
Media
Schedule
from May 31, 2012 to June 30, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-05-31 from 18:00 to 20:00