"Our poster, light installation, and glass/mirror assemblage—along with talks, performance, writing, and other actions taking place during exhibition—hold and transmit the many unseen people and efforts that resonate for Ivy Kwan Arce, across generations, borders, and identities of AIDS activism centering women of color.
We both look to presence and absence as a dynamic horizon. A light installation responds to cues from four glass orbs fitted with data relays sent out to four friends in Ivy’s global circle. Saturated with east-facing daylight and fractured across the bodies of museum visitors, the lights receive and signal Ivy’s system of support in real-time.
The tiered steel and mirror structure similarly reflects the immediate environment but also supports “archives of glass.” Each collection includes a rebellious piece that has been engineered with a potential to break - holding close inside the necessity for change. Overlapping institutions of gender, race, HIV status, class, and nationality define and stigmatize, yet their cracks, like fissures and openings, express how constellated movements disrupt these constructs.
In this sprawling project, we take up space(s) to challenge art, activism, and ourselves to ask: how might we value the excesses, ruptures, and unruly shifts in our bodies, communities, health, policies, institutions, and relationships over time. As women of color in the fight for the lives of all people with HIV, and especially to raise the voices of positive self-identified women, what can we do for each other?"
Fri, Oct 7, 2022
1–9 pm
Floor 3, Susan and John Hess Family Gallery and Theater
HOLD TIGHT GENTLY is
an eight-hour durational performance
a collaboration between Julie Tolentino, Stosh Fila, and Robert Takahashi Crouch
a single action splintered into many parts
a break, a rupture, and a mark
a feedback loop
a sonic reflection of voices, movements, and utterances
a collection of pauses, pressures, needs, and potentials
a movement meditation in the form of velocities
an invitation to reflect and to take back time
a cycle of connection and loss
a pact
a reminder
on repeat.
For this performance, the artists invite visitors to observe minimal yet attentive actions between performers and objects within a live sound and mirror installation. HOLD TIGHT GENTLY is accompanied by a day-long conversation hosted by Tolentino and Jih-Fei Cheng, let’s talk: vulnerable bodies, intimate collectivities which takes place next door in The Hearst Artspace.
In the words of Tolentino: “Hovering over an inclined, mirrored platform set against the slowly setting sun on the Museum’s third floor, HOLD TIGHT GENTLY honors the weighted impact of another person. Offered as touch, the work reflects on myriad sensorial and affective experiences: of being held, pushed, encouraged, missed, heard, misunderstood, beloved, and lost. Projected light reflects the movement imprint of care circles. The sound in the work is impacted by conversations leaking into the space from the gathering of co-conspirators in the adjoining room: artists, advocates, activists, poets, writers, museum staff, and visitors.”
HOLD TIGHT GENTLY follows ECHO POSITION, a collaboration between Ivy Kwan Arce and Julie Tolentino, that was a project involving light, glass, and a framed poster in Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept.
The HOLD TIGHT GENTLY title is inspired by the last line of the late Donald Woods’s poem "Prescription."
Fri, Oct 7, 2022
12–8 pm
Floor 3
Presentations by
Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, Tiffany Marrero ,Tamara Oyola-Santiago + Bronx Móvil, Pato Hebert, Jih-Fei Cheng + Julie Tolentino,
Moving image works by
Demian DinéYazhi', Theodore (Ted) Kerr + Julie Tolentino, Kia Labeija, Kang Sueng Lee. Ray Navarro, Nguyen Tan Hoang
In a world in which connectivity cannot be refused, this day-long conversation asks: how can we negotiate interpersonal and communal boundaries instead of fortifying and defending borders—institutional, physical, social, and geographical? How do we think about and enact activism against the toll of multiple pandemics as they bear upon our psyches, bodies, and communities? What dialogue and action might unfold as we address viruses as agents of change? In gathering together speakers, creatives, audience, and recorded accounts, we inquire: what’s provoking you at this time?
Julie Tolentino and activist, writer, and scholar Jih-Fei Cheng collaborate to highlight the work of artist-activists and members of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD?) collective. Engaging with visionary forms of activism, each presenter reframes our common understanding of risk, instead finding opportunities for radical transformations of the unjust status quo. In dialogue with these concerns, the day is punctuated by a repeating slide presentation and video works. This chorus of participants invite us to redefine our shifting terms for intimacy, safety, and community, and to improvise our ways of being, and being together.
Schedule of Presentations
12 pm Julie Tolentino and Jih-Fei Cheng
1 pm Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad
3 pm Tiffany Marrero
6 pm Tamara Oyola-Santiago + Bronx Móvil
7 pm Pato Hebert
Moving image works by Demian DinéYazhi', Theodore (Ted) Kerr + Julie Tolentino, Kia Labeija, Kang Sueng Lee. Ray Navarro, Nguyen Tan Hoang screen throughout the day.
let’s talk: vulnerable bodies, intimate collectivities and its companion durational performance, HOLD TIGHT GENTLY, follow ECHO POSITION, a collaboration between Ivy Kwan Arce and Julie Tolentino for Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept.
Title: FOREVER YOUNG, 2021
A mirrored glass cube splits apart into units: glittering metonyms; blood red and black abrasions stain their surfaces.
Julie Tolentino takes a smoldering slurry of acid and a razor blade to the mirror glass, coaxing it to reveal the initials of those loved and lost. Each chemical wash is a testament of remembrance, conjuring the bodies and spirits taken by racialized violence and stigmatized illness. Spilling from their aggregated cube in ever-changing configurations, the confluence of mirrored boxes creates kaleidoscopic feedback loops of edges and vertices, recalling the mobility of grief. Karen Barad writes that “loss is not absence but a marked presence, or rather a marking that troubles the divide between absence and presence.”
The haunts, ghosting across the mirror, separate us from the familiarity of our reflections in a silent intercession. The marred reflections resist the mirror’s seduction, its compulsion to merely echo its surroundings; rather it tampers with material reality to reveal a world shot through with loss, with the viewer as a sole, and forever-marked, survivor.
TITLE: (WALL)
This space / our wor(l)ds are under pressure. To incoming intergenerational pleasure as a reminder in dark times that there is so much in oneself to give.
3’w x 10’t , free-standing
Materials: steel, mirror, acid, glass, plywood, glue
TITLE: (COUNTER)
We hold these temporal galaxies with salty refusal, a full body pleasure, floating and submerging.
10’w x 3’t x 2’d
Materials: steel, mirror, acid, glass, plywood, glue
LOCATION: Aspen Art Museum – November 2020
TITLE: THE GOVERNESS - -scent
Presented on a 1’x1’ mirror cube (1 of 6)
Materials:
Infused Mohave creosote combined with Oman Frankincense from Enfleurage, NY, beeswax, ginger root
Pictured sitting upon:
(COUNTER)
We hold these temporal galaxies with salty refusal, a full body pleasure, floating and submerging.
Day: Durational Performance 12-4pm
Night: ONE-TO-ONE 4:30p-2am
This project will be accompanied by .bury.me.fiercely.—a 35-minute special late night performance on Dec 12th at 10pm by Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila.
As a week-long performance-installation, Tolentino’s new durational work, Slipping Into Darkness, plays out in both the Day and the Night. In the daylight of the winter sun, movers breathe, labor, and shift while sheathed under the cover of a thick “horizon” made from leather, scented oils, reflective surfaces, and dense sound. In the evening, participants join in an intimate one-to-one exchange immersed in a dark pool of mineral water. Working with and below these evocative opaque surfaces, Tolentino reaches for the sensual, the subjective excess of each encounter. Loss tenders refuge. Space and time open to the accounts of Others—the imprecisely labeled, unseen, or overlooked—and the inspiring visionaries who thrive as not-of-this-world future-makers. Tolentino tunes us into spaces that generously blur yet ignite our shadowy interiors and fugitive poetics with time’s future-past to float with that which falls in and out of grasp.
Collaborators include Robert Crouch, Aldo Hernandez
Performers: Anna Marischello, Ariel Osterweis, Echo, Charlie Mai, Stosh Fila, Julie Tolentino
Commissioned by Performance Space New York
https://performancespacenewyork.org/shows/slipping-into-darkness-page/
September 21st–November 2nd, 2019
Commonwealth and Council presents REPEATER, Julie Tolentino’s immersive installation incorporating sculpture, video, and 108 hours of performance in a kaleidoscopic vision of queer longevity—a life of shards, composed by loss and continually makeshift.
\CUT\
A dark room, punctuated by low, shifting lights is rigged to diminish the appearance of tiny actions—which escape illumination, withdraw, slip away. More time, more reflection. This makes more room: for artifice, penetration, and sensuous breaks. For the queer commons, its histories, and its posterity. Room also to mingle and be haunted, as well as moved. To lose one’s object, amid objects in the room: wire frame cubes dangle from the ceiling or graze the floor; boxes covered in aged mirrors generate an evolving landscape of angled reflections, deflected in fragments. Together with the lights, they situate workspaces in partial, fleeting glimmers that defy capture.
\CUT\
REPEATER harbors deep, distant "insides" behind a reflective facade, meanwhile trailing the choppy residues of recurring disruptions. There is no “outward” performance. Tolentino’s micro-actions produce tremors that keep the room changing, moving, shifting, reconfiguring. Disguised as trivial durational placeholder or a dreamer’s haptic escape, these deep dives accelerate the quotidian through inquiries of inner logic, making and remaking temporary structures—bodies, constructions, fabulations, queer habitats: sparse yet generous worlds, demolished before they can fully emerge.
Six-hour object-driven meditations tune a sense of time tendered in swings, shakes, and shudders, dragging and reallocating the ever-changing shadows toward illegibility. The concurrent collections of 108 objects—razors from Tolentino's hourly cutting, slides sampling the blood, raw prints from motion-activated night vision cameras preserved in glass—catalog the work of time: an unmappable territory that is the province of desire, its accumulated images and objects marking time spent unfolding, not becoming.
\CUT\
Three figures animate REPEATER: Mr. Exhibit A, The Red Void, and The Shiny Dark Figure, each comprising a distinct attitude that is ever present, even if unseen.
Mr. Exhibit A (named after Tolentino's 1998 performance piece) strives to keep the room and all its elements in flux, varying the speed and degree of changes. Polyamorous by nature, Mr. Exhibit A and The Red Void both resist any single configuration or action. Not that one. Wrong body. Too certain. Rephrase. Do over. Refract. More this. More them. Turning away, misread, failing, falling out. Into: The dark. The night. The party. Sex. The club. The void. Still teachers, these crevices. Still places of change.
In contrast, The Shiny Dark Figure references the aging body, moving at a slower pace within a reflective black "void" that conceals the body while letting parts occasionally slip out into view through various holes. (A video of the artist performing inside another kind of void on Fire Island plays once per hour.) Against neoliberal conceptions of wellness, whiteness, and wholeness, The Shiny Dark Figure is marked, wanting, and wrong: aging, brown, queer, decaying, disabled, and haunted by its growing ledger of ghosts. A body that doesn't recover but unfolds.
\CUT\
REPEATER concerns both presence and loss, resistance and grief, and insular processes continually unravelling their apparent conceits. Not just taking time, taking it back: from that universalizing progressive whiteness that only subsumes difference under paper promises of improvement, voiding the other body. Seen or unseen, legible or not, Tolentino's performances reopen disappeared spaces for disappeared bodies to get a foothold, wander, and change—regaining other time through her and our interloping interventions among dissembling surfaces.
\CUT\
Sounds heard during REPEATER are collected and developed in collaboration with Robert Crouch. The artist also acknowledges the sustained collaboration and artistry of Pigpen/Stosh Fila, whose touch is deeply felt throughout this work.
2’ x 2’ cube, in memory of this year of flight: RS, DC, DH, RZ, Stanley Love, and Alessandro Codagnone.
http://commonwealthandcouncil.com/exhibitions/repeater/press
Opening Reception: Friday, May 24, 5–8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11–6 pm
To haunt means to linger past a welcome or to be persistently or disturbingly present. As a noun, a haunt refers to the figure of the ghost—a spectral form that comes from the past to speak to the present about the future—as well as to an oft-frequented locale, the local haunt. Against a backdrop of cultural institutions that are more and more eager to “represent” certain types of “fugitive” bodies, the exhibition understands haunting as a kind of representational illogic. Through a focus on collective memory, and alternative archival practices, Always, Already, Haunting, "disss-co," Haunt lingers alongside those events or bodies who continue to demand attention, foregrounding the inevitability of returns and the necessity of redress.
The exhibition features works by Julie Dash, Minnie Evans, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Green-Wood cemetery, shawné michaelain holloway, Asif Mian, Guadalupe Rosales, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
Curated by Nia Nottage, Gwyneth Shanks, and Simon Wu, the 2018–19 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney's Independent Study Program (ISP).
Curated by Sadia Shirazi
EFA Project Space presents Soft and Wet, curated by Sadia Shirazi. The exhibition features works by Arooj Aftab, Beverly Buchanan, Crystal Z Campbell, Caroline Key, Ana Mendieta, Andy Robert, Julie Tolentino, Zarina, and Constantina Zavitsanos.
The exhibition cites Prince’s 1978 single, “Soft and Wet” and Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, which was co-curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina at A.I.R. Gallery in 1980. These citations serve as reference points to help us locate fleshy, formalist impulses in the practices of contemporary artists that echo those of artists from the 1970s. Working through sound, vision, vibration, touch, and breath, the artists in Soft and Wet activate multi-sensory responses that move beyond the linguistic registers of a singular voice and questions of individuated agency dominating discourses of representational art. The artists turn their formalism towards questions of flesh, fugitivity, and consent in relation to the nation-state, neoliberal capitalism, and the medical-industrial complex, while stretching formalism beyond the assumption of hegemonic subjects as the sole inheritors of its legacy. The works in this show are experiments in, and explorations of, what it means “to consent not to be a single being” as Édouard Glissant writes. The artists in Soft and Wet think with and through one another, invoking the artist whose song gives the exhibition its title, to feel out the contours of other ways of being in relation. They join him in saying—We’d be so lost, in our mouths, the best, I feel it everyday (every way).
Curated by Conrad Ventur
Considering themes of time, caregiving, and transformation, Altered After presents artworks that incorporate archives, archaeology, salvaged objects, material migrations, inherited knowledge and bequests in response to HIV/AIDS. For these artists, stewarding material remnants and activating new meaning from them is a form of care and also a call to bring new engagement and life to what has been lost and left behind. Their practices build bonds of kinship and give form to legacies and personal histories. The artists in Altered After are field guides reporting between worlds through paint, movement, video and film, light and chemistry, plants, everyday materials, thread, stone, pebbles, and clay.
Curated by Rudy Lemcke
Includes artworks by queer artists: Bren Ahearn Cassils Jaime Cortez Jamee Crusan Arthur Dong Jason Hanasik Jamil Hellu Angela Hennessy Xandra Ibarra Kadet Kuhne Việt Lê Tim Roseborough, David Wojnarowicz and Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila (Honey, 2013)
Curated by Nao Bustamente & Xandra Ibarra.
Performance in the galleries + Video in Oculus Hall--> Luciana Achugar, Amapola Prada, Carmina Escobar, Minaya, Xandra + Rob Fatal, Mickey Negro, Abigail Severance + Julie Tolentino's evidence, 2014
BROAD: https://www.thebroad.org/programs/en-cuatro-patas-feminist-latinx-performance-and-video
HYPERALLERGIC: https://hyperallergic.com/443919/en-cuatro-patas-the-broad/
May 27 - September 23, 2018 marks the seventh season of the BOFFO Residency. Nominated and selected by our past Fire Island artists from over 150 considerations, Kia LaBeija, Brontez Purnell, House of LaDosha, Julie Tolentino, Meriem Bennani, Torkwase Dyson, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Guadalupe Rosales will bring an exciting array of artistic practices to Fire Island.
99 Gansevoort St, New York City
When: Friday, July 13, 2018
https://www.aaa.si.edu/symposia/visual-arts-and-the-aids-epidemic
<See full schedule at link>
3:30–4:15 p.m. (45 minutes)
Panel III Alex Fialho
Race, gender, and protest: lessons from AIDS activism
Collective political action groups. Confronting oppressions, social activism, and inv
99 Gansevoort St, New York City
When: Friday, July 13, 2018
https://www.aaa.si.edu/symposia/visual-arts-and-the-aids-epidemic
<See full schedule at link>
3:30–4:15 p.m. (45 minutes)
Panel III Alex Fialho
Race, gender, and protest: lessons from AIDS activism
Collective political action groups. Confronting oppressions, social activism, and inventing new ways of protest. Activism then and now. A “how-to” for activism today.
The symposium, free and open to the public. It will also be live-streamed.