What is called AIDS is, for consciousness and for thought, a necessarily impossible object. – William Haver, The Body of This Death And if memory encrypts what is lost in death, it also preserves the lost other and our libidinal…
Author: avantika
At 35: Writing the Viral Bildungsroman[1]
Ricky Varghese Memory resides somewhere between the neurotic insistence of something akin to truth, and the uncanny, vertigo-inducing vagaries of fiction. The past is undoubtedly easily forgettable and yet we persist, at least at times, in remembering it, despite how…
À Vancouver
Vincent Chevalier All images are stills from À Vancouver, 2016, Digital video. Images by and courtesy the artist. À Vancouver is an experimental video essay based in autobiography, featuring interviews with my father about our familial and individual sexual histories.…
A Political Sense of Being at Home with HIV and Video
Alexandra Juhasz (in conversation with Jih-Fei Cheng and Lucas Hilderbrand, and Adam Geary, Theodore Kerr, Nishant Shahani, Dagmawi Woubshet, and others)[1] Queer time and place register and change in media and conversation about HIV and the bodies and domiciles…
‘Pray to be released from image’[1]: Mourning, Desire and Self-Erasure in Derek Jarman’s Blue
Oliver Penny The apparent choices of art are nothing but addictions, pre-dispositions. The aesthetic is nothing but a return to images that will allow nothing to take their place. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Out of a Book,’ The Mulberry Tree Trauma…
‘Remembering Well’: Sexual Practice as a Practice of Remembering
Kate Bride A Prologue by Amber Dean When I saw Ricky Varghese’s call for papers for this special issue of Drain on AIDS and memory, I immediately thought of the essay ‘Remembering Well’ by my friend and colleague Kate…
Sick Memory: On the Un-detectable in Archiving Aids
Katrin Köppert and Todd Sekuler Introduction In 2015, the self-acclaimed progressive men’s magazine the VANGARDIST published a special edition labeled #HIVHEROES as a reminder that being HIV-positive is still a stigma and a taboo. Printed with ink infused with…
‘I don’t know what made this ‘private’ in the first place.’: Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS Dance and The Disco Project
Jaime Shearn Coan Screenshot from recording of Not-About-AIDS Dance, 1994. Image courtesy of Neil Greenberg and the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image of the Dance Collection of the NYPL. Prologue: ‘begin again and then begin again again’…
Revisiting AIDS and Its Metaphors
Ryan Conrad …history is a process of generalization, an elevator pitch, and we privilege the stories that are easier to tell. In the public sphere, complexities are frequently slipped under the shadows of our zeitgeists, and well-worn media tropes supplant…
The Extended Scene: Seeing Queer Futurity through the work of Colin Campbell
Francisco-Fernando Granados To engage with the relationship between queerness and visuality is to speak of a particular sense. A sense that, while particular, is not always fully explainable in the present tense. Something of this particularly elusive queer sensibility pervades…