Witnessing “Survival AIDS” Event

Witnessing “Survival AIDS”
An evening symposium, with performance by Hunter Reynolds

Saturday May 7, 2011  7 PM - midnight
Symposium 7:30 - 9:30 PM / Performance to follow
gallery hours extended until midnight
 
Visual AIDS presents Witnessing “Survival AIDS” a symposium which examines how HIV/AIDS reconfigured/reconfigures queer identify formation and contemporary visual and performance art. Presentations by David Deitcher, Nathan Lee, Virginia Solomon, and Anthony Viti.

About the panelists:

Born in Montreal, Canada, David Deitcher is a New York-based writer, art historian, critic and independent curator whose essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, the Village Voice, and other periodicals, as well as in numerous anthologies and monographs on such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Isaac Julien, and Wolfgang Tillmans. He is the author of Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 and curator of the exhibition of the same name that appeared at the International Center of Photography in New York. He has been core faculty at the International Center of Photography/Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies since its inception in 2003, and core faculty as well at the Vermont College of Fine Arts /Visual Arts Department since 1997. Deitcher was recently awarded a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program grant to assist him in writing Once More, with Feeling, a book about the emergence of art during the mid-to-late 1980s within the context of the AIDS crisis that, without resorting to expressionist rhetoric, evokes emotion, rather than masking it.

Nathan Lee will present “Hold My Bones: Curating a Viral Genealogy”. Presenting documentation of the 2011 exhibition "Break My Body, Hold My Bones”,  Lee discusses the transmission of ideas, forms, and affects across several generations with radically different experiences of HIV/AIDS. The exhibition, a commissioned installation of Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham (DUOX), began with Lee’s invitation to respond to Derek Jarman's BLUE. Nathan Lee is critic and curator based in New York. A former film critic for the New York Times, Village Voice, and NPR, he is a contributing editor of Film Comment. Recent curatorial projects include CLAP (Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson), Without Me....You (Yama, Istanbul) and Buddy List (Space 414, Brooklyn). Lee is a Program Associate at SALT (Istanbul) and a masters candidate at the Center For Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Virginia Solomon will be presenting “Portraits without People, Politics without Policies - Queer Art and Efficacy.”  Virginia Solomon advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in December of 2009. She specializes in  modern and contemporary art, culture, and politics. Her dissertation,  tentatively titled 'Modeling Queer Methods: General Idea's Art and  Politics, 1969-1994,' considers the work of Canadian artist group  General Idea. She places the group's practice in the context of an expanded and evolving conversation concerning the relationship  between art and politics, and argues that its incorporation of sexuality enabled it to reconfigure what constituted both political and artistic activity. Other interests include feminist theory, cultural studies, and  visual studies. Solomon was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney  Independent Study Program for the 2007/2008 academic year. She was a  2009/2010 Canadian Art Research Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, and is the 2010/2011 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the  Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She graduated from  Stanford University in 2004 with a B.A. in studio art and feminist  studies.

Anthony Viti will present “Bottoms Up”, a selections from his work as an artist and as an activist while contemplating the shifting popular attitudes and visual representations of HIV/AIDS, HIV-prevention, and AIDS advocacy. Anthony Viti is an artist and arts educator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His work over the last 25 years has been formed by AIDS activism and personal history. He has had solo exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Deven Golden Fine Arts in New York and participated in group exhibitions at the Cobra Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco; White Columns, NY. Anthony has been a grant recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Foundation, Penny McCall Foundation, Art Matters, and has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  His work is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and he holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. 

Moderated by Amy Sadao, Visual AIDS.

**The symposium will precede a mummification performance by Hunter Reynolds.  Witnessing "Survival AIDS" is being presented in conjunction with Survival AIDS, a major solo exhibition by Hunter Reynolds.

Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS is a new series of works that incorporate elements spanning 25 years of image making, and constructed around Hunters' experience as a gay man living in the age of AIDS. Survival AIDS will combine three modalities that he has used in various ways in his work over the years: the Blood Spot series, Mummification Performance Skins, and Photo Weavings.  Read more here.  May 1 – June 5, 2011 
 
Exhibition and events are free and open to the public

Participant Inc.
253 East Houston, NYC