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USA, 1983, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 38’

In both, David Wojnarowicz’s writing, live music and fragmentary and elusive images compose a mood which masterfully encapsulates a time of anger and melancholia. The second session, meanwhile, leaves these iconoclastic and transgressive gestures to one side, reflecting instead on loss and mourning with Fear of Disclosure and ITSOFOMO, two works lying between performance, multimedia installation and expanded cinema. In the first, searing and parodic works are displayed, acerbically distilling a profound non-conformity with the American way of life and united in fiction through the most violent protests against the system, from serial killers to massacres meted out randomly among the population - as Wojnarowicz wrote, behind the sheen of the American dream is the “killing machine called America”. Moreover, this expression condenses the ambivalence gathered in the series, for instance the sexual vitalism of the gay community in opposition to the thanatological paranoia AIDS produced, or moral freedom on the margins of consent in opposition to the rage against a society which only tolerated such freedom while it remained precarious and out of sight.Īcross two highly divergent sessions, the series surveys these dilemmas between violence and autonomy, destruction and love. The title of the series, ‘deathtripping’, is in reference to a term writer Jack Sargeant used to characterise the underground film experiences in New York in the 1980s, in the book Deathtripping. The programme, comprising two double sessions, features the work of Richard Kern, Tommy Turner, Kirsten Bates, Allen Frame, Ben Neill and Phil Zwickler, artists for whom life on the edge was a way to express their keen sense of rage and discontent with the sexual moralism and complaisance that pervaded the USA across that decade.

History Keeps Me Awake at Night (running until 30 September 2019), this series presents the post-punk and trash experiences that resulted from the film collaborations of artist David Wojnarowicz (New Jersey, USA, 1954 – New York, USA, 1992) with New York’s East Village art community in the 1980s. Inside the framework of the exhibition David Wojnarowicz.