In solidarity with the call to action posed by World Aids Day and Day With(out) Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art presents a poetry reading, short film screening, and publication launch on the evening of November 29.
This event is free and open to the public; register here.
Philadelphia-based poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sague will present a short reading, followed by a screening of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, a selection of videos that prioritizes black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic and is curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett for Visual AIDS. This year’s selection includes seven new videos from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell. ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS will also screen continuously in the ICA auditorium on Friday, December 1 from 11AM to 5PM.
This program marks the public launch of a publication, the moon will sink into the street, featuring work by writers Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, LA Warman, and Savannah Shange, assembled for Day With(out) Art by ICA’s Heather Holmes, and designed by Jared Rush Jackson. The publication addresses—and complicates—questions of (queer) futurity, linearity, and the im/possibilities of historicizing AIDS. It is free, distributed widely throughout Philadelphia, and available as a print-on-demand PDF here.
GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUE is a Miami–>Philly, Latino, gay Leo. His first collection, Oil and Candle (March 2016, Timeless, Infinite Light), is a set of writings on Santería, war, and the precarity of Latino-American lives. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently Where Everything is in Halves (Be About It, 2015), poems against death through The Legend of Zelda, and ‘Yo’ Quiere Decir Sunburn (2016), poems of anxious bilingualism. His second full-length book Jazzercise is a Language is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2018.
SAVANNAH SHANGE is a Black queer femme scholar who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and holds a joint PhD in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has been featured in Women and Performance, The Feminist Wire & Anthropology News. Her research interests include Black femme gender, queer of color critique, and the afterlife of slavery.
LA WARMAN is a poet and performer. She is the founder of GLASS PRESS, a publisher of art and poetry on flash drives. Warman has had work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, Time-Based Art Festival, General Public Collective, Flying Object, and Open Engagement. She has chapbooks from Inpatient Press and After Hours Ltd. Warman is also the author of Whore Foods, a serialized erotic novella.