NYAB Event - “Ephemera as Evidence” Exhibition

“Ephemera as Evidence” Exhibition

La MaMa La Galleria

This event has ended.

Visual AIDS presents Ephemera as Evidence an exhibition curated by Josh Lubin-Levy and Ricardo Montez which brings together visual art, performance, and pedagogical projects that evidence past lives and future possibilities in the work of artists confronting HIV/AIDS. Ephemera as Evidence, on view at La MaMa La Galleria, invites viewers to think through the ephemeral as necessary to the political life of HIV. Featuring artists working in various media, the show is organized according to three distinct yet interrelated modes of creating worlds: performance, intimacy, and pedagogy. A series of public programs will take place at the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition.

Taking its title from a 1996 essay written by José Esteban Muñoz (1967 - 2013), Ephemera as Evidence argues for a sustained engagement with traces of queer life. In what way are these traces transformed over time? How do the performative capacities of art illuminate alternative strategies for survival, particularly when that art emerges from contingent, fleeting organizations that are constantly “evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility?”

The exhibition acknowledges a larger history of silence and erasure around HIV/AIDS while at the same time making salient necessary life enhancing practices in the face of an often violent and phobic public sphere.

To consider ephemera in the social and cultural life of HIV/AIDS today is to consider both the burden and blessing of continued life. Within our contemporary moment the question is not merely one of living on but of how different registers of vitality reverberate beyond the immediacy of a crisis.

The works in this exhibition ask us to consider how changing demographics of those affected by HIV/AIDS, and the resulting reorientations to crisis, force new kinds of temporalities in an engagement with both the past and the future.

Media

• Painting
• Other
• Performance Art

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