Talks

The pandemic is far from over, vaccination is imperfect, long-covid is a significant threat, politics plays hardball with our lives, we are underprepared for the horizon of other viruses, consequences are vastly unequally distributed, and we are likely to be anxious, in denial, and puzzled about how best to respond. In this Roundtable, four prominent artists and scholars will present art and organizing strategies drawn from lived experience with chronic illness, community activism, and the personal and political demands long-hauling presents.

Videomaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz and writer Theodore Kerr, co-authors of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, will discuss the necessarily multiple time frames of long-time HIV/AIDS activism.

Artist Lorie Novak will share and discuss Migraine Register, her durational photographic commitment to making visible the significant impact of this chronic and pervasive but invisible condition.

Writer Meghan O’Rourke, Editor of The Yale Review and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness will consider the challenge of narrating auto-immune and other poorly understood illness when no coherent story readily appears.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr, along with special guests Rev. Michael J. Crumpler, Cait McKinney, and Amy Sadao, for the launch of their book “We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production,” at the Bureau of General Services, Queer Division.

Doing Things with Stories Narrative Change Residents Alexandra Juhasz and Diana Ocholla deep-dive into how they approach crisis and stories, and invite you to exercise narrative change in five short video episodes. We live with and within crises. We tell stories of crises, and in crises, to make sense of what is happening around us. While crises alienate, stories connect. As scarce resources lead to a withdrawal into the individual, stories bring us back into the collective. Even as crises create a false sense of competition, making different groups battle for the limited opportunities, stories foster a sense of community, bringing us together to see how the problems that we face are shared and collective.

Panel conversation on Alanis Obomsawin

With Alexandra Juhasz, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Krista Belle Stewart and Richard William Hill, moderated by Richard Fung at HKW, Berlin.

NO FUTURE WITHOUT THE PAST
Who decides today what we will remember tomorrow? Panel discussion on Feminism, Diversity & Film Archives on occasion of the Berlinale 2016.

For the 13th international symposium, “Gift of Nam June Paik 13,” a discussion about the digital archive of Nam June Paik’s video and its possibilities and limits under the theme of “video digital commons.”

The beginning point of this symposium is Nam June Paik’s essays, “Extended Education for the Paperless Society” (1968) and “Random Access Information”(1980), which inspired us in the first place to imagine a digital video archive. Via an examination of the current attributes of the digital archive―ephemeral, virtual, moving images, etc.―we will reach discussions about what kind of “digital commons” should be achieved through Nam June Paik Art Center digital video archive.

Relational Space (https://www.Relational-Space.org) presents – ‘Long COVID: We Are Here!’ a fearless exploration into the COVID-19 Long-hauler experience.

This video (made with support from NYFA/CAC grant) features:

1- A virtual walk-through of the groundbreaking, immersive VR Arts + Science exhibition ‘Long COVID: We Are Here!’

2- An insightful discussion between the exhibition participants and a panel of Medical experts who are researching and treating patients with Long COVID and ME/CFS.

3- This event is closed with the world premiere of a choreographed piece by Rhapsody James – choreographer, dancer, creative director, and actress – entitled: Long COVID Battle

Marty Fink and Alex Juhasz in intergenerational conversation about the ongoing legacy of HIV caregiving, celebrating the launch of Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care.

Queer and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together to take care of each other in the face of state violence. This book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities today.

Purchase Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care (paperback, $29.95) from the Bureau of General Service Queer Division’s online store: https://tinyurl.com/287j6bx6

Red Stage, The People’s Platform, Astor Place

Q&A with Devon Narine-Singh

Berlinale Teddy Talk with John Greyson, Wieland Speck, and host, Zsombor Bobák

A global pandemic. An afflicted, angry group. A seemingly indifferent government. Reporter Tracie Hunte wanted to understand this moment of pain and confusion by looking back 30 years, and she found a complicated answer to a simple question: When nothing seems to work, how do you make change?

This episode was reported by Tracie Hunte, and produced by Annie McEwen and Tobin Low. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. 

4-part video essay for H8URS: Video Essays with Real Filmmakers and Professors.

Cheryl Dunye and Alexandra Juhasz join Programmer and Curator Tara Brown to discuss their inventive and funny romance The Watermelon Woman, and reflect on the film’s sexual expression.

For DSSN and Media Studies

PLASMA, University of Buffalo, with Katherine Cheairs, March 2020.

Respondent

Walk through and panel for Metanoia

San Diego State University

Metanoia LA public programming

Invitational conference, Hong Kong Baptist University

Association of Moving Image Archivists

American Studies Association

With over 40 contributors from around the world, this issue of the On Curating journal wrestles with “forgetting”, “seeing”, “collecting” and “making” AIDS related culture in the 21st century, and the growing impulse to historize aspects of early responses to the crisis. Through academic essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints and personal reflections, a reader will be exposed to ideas, theories, images, and advice from artists, academics, activists, curators, writers and others around the ethics and practices of curating AIDS-related culture within the ongoing epidemic. At this event, NYC based contributors will share their work, and engage in conversation with each other and guests.

Visible Evidence, 2019

Digital Methods Summer School

University of Amsterdam, July 2019

Panelist, CLAGS, CUNY Grad Center.

Margaret Rhee’s Harvard University class presentation about Fake News Poetry Workshops with Chet’la Sebree.

NYU, Cinema Studies Department, panelist.

Grad Center, CUNY, American Studies Program. Panel with fellow Brooklyn College professors.

NYU Performance Studies Department with Barbara Browning.

Advance Screening: Native Son for CUNY. Moderator.

Respondent to Vinicius Navarro.

A video program for Metanoia

Programmed with Katherine Cheairs.

The NY Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

NYU Art Department.

“I’ve Left Documentary Entirely,” on Fake News Poetry Workshops

Brooklyn College, Hess Scholar, Jose David Saldivar in conversation with poets and writers. March 2019.

Presentation on AIDS activist video for Television History class.

Fake News Poetry Video Workshop with Orr Meniron and Kyle Booten at Dartmouth College Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Center.

Union Docs, Program Moderator. How and why practices subvert the formal and political logics of character-driven storytelling. One response to “Beyond Story.”

Columbia University, “DiAna’s Hair Ego Remix.”

Session on my activist queer writing/media; Princeton University, November 2018.

The second Fake News Video-Poetry Workshop occurred on November 3, 2018, in New Haven.

Interfaces are the central instruments in the new economy of signs. They are both tools and discursive frames. Interfaces, insofar as they are instituted as an order of discourse, are transitive and mediating. Post-truth is the term coined to define a linguistic regime in which objective facts are less influential in the formation of public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. This phenomenon can be analyzed as a specific system of interfaces where a whole set of communicative, technical, social, political and economic issues converge.

University of Barcelona, Spain. Presentation on Fake News Poetry Workshops. November 2018.

Panel Chair, AIDS, Media and Memory: Legacies and Contestations in the Ongoing Emergency of the AIDS Crisis, ASA, November 2018.

Legacies and Contestations in the Ongoing Emergency of the AIDS Crisis, Panel Chair, November 2018.

The eleventh Fake News Poetry Workshop occurred on October 2, 2018, in Manhattan NY, led by Cathy James working with ten or more poets in the group “Poets of Course” (formerly Poets of Corsi).

My VHS AIDS Archives: Confessions from the Field of Queer Feminist Media Praxis.

Video and powerpoint of talk available here: https://aljean.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/my-vhs-archives-confessions-from-the-field-of-queer-feminist-media-praxis.

How Do We ReFrame the Conversation on Gender and Intersectionality; featured speaker, September 2018.

On VHS Archives, September 2018.

With Claudia Rankine, September 2018.

September 2018.

This symposium develops out of an oral history project of the same name undertaken by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, focusing on memories of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s and features conversations with artists, activists, and oral historians. July 2018.

June 2018.

The Watermelon Woman and Imitation of Life, May 2018.

Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Occidental College, May 2018.

On Fake News Poetry Workshops, May 2018.

Fake News Poetry Workshop, with Orr Menirom, May 2018.

Margaret Rhee and Chet’la Sebree, NY, May 2018. Supported by Poets & Writers Grant.

Featured Graduate, on Fake News Poetry Workshops, April 2018.