Artist in Residence Talk | "Dismantling the Dominant AIDS Narrative: An Activist Perspective on a Political History "by Avram Finkelstein

The only ethical response to the attempt to write the “History of AIDS” in the midst of an ongoing pandemic is to dismantle it as it is being constructed. One way to do that is through the images that are used to represent it, the canon of AIDS political art that came out of ACT UP. The dominant narrative proposes the ACT UP AIDS activist story as a key component in the “History of AIDS,” but in the context of this telling it is more accurately the gravitational pull of one tiny fragment of it, the tale of an embattled community demanding the drug research that led to the doorstep of pharmaceutical interventions offering viral suppression to patients with access, a narrative painting institutional frameworks as receptive to “dissent.” In this context it is a saga deployed as part of an intricate ecosystem of power narratives that has triggered a second crisis, a crisis of remembering, and it has tipped artists, activists, and archivists into a historiological tailspin.

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He is one of the founding members of the Silence=Death collective and the art collective, Gran Fury, with whom he collaborated on public art commissions for international institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Venice Biennale, Artforum and The New Museum. He has just completed a book on dismantling the AIDS narrative through its images, and is one of the artists featured in the upcoming Visual Arts and AIDS Epidemic oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Thursday, September 29, 2016 6-8 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003