Queer Communication: A Conversation with Ron Athey and Friends
Image caption: Overall view of Ron Athey, Joyce, 2002, Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany; video screenshot. Video: Cyril Kuhn
Queer Communication: A Conversation with Ron Athey and Friends
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 | 7:00 pm EST
Celebrating “Queer Communion,” a retrospective of the work of Los Angeles-based performance artist Ron Athey at New York’s PARTICIPANT INC., Zackary Drucker and Arshia Fatima Haq will discuss Athey’s work and influence with the artist. Malik Gaines and Lia Gangitano will introduce the conversation.
Ron Athey has been working in performance for 40 years. Self-taught and motivated by the club-era performances of Johanna Went, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection. In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo and Incorruptible Flesh, that reflect Athey’s collaborations with the late Lawrence Steger. Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment is Athey’s vision for an automatic writing machine brought to life in collaboration with composer and opera director Sean Griffin. Athey has been writing Gifts of the Spirit since 1980 when he moved away from the Pentecostal and Spiritualist practices in which he was raised. These writings describe his experience of growing up as a “living saint” within an environment of abuse, vibrating with the energy of the otherworldly and doing so without faith. Currently Athey is presenting Acephalous Monster, a performance with projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text and sound. The work is an attempt to make sense of a current reality where neo-fascism is mutating, creeping, and marching. Upcoming showings will be a special August 2021 showing at REDCAT with Opera Povera accompaniment, in conjunction with Queer Communion at ICA LA. Athey is also currently working on editing a monograph of the artist Johanna Went, and collaborating with Hermes Pittakos on a new work, The Asclepeion. Athey is the recipient of Art Matters, CCA, American Academy of Religion and Artadia, and Harpo Foundation grants.
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, filmmaker, and cultural producer. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMa PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me, and was a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Amazon show Transparent. The Lady and The Dale, her directorial debut for television, premieres on HBO in January 2021.
Arshia Fatima Haq works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and the blurred lines between fact and fiction. Her body of work stems from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas – woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen – and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region. Haq's work has been featured at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive. Currently, she hosts and produces monthly radio shows on Dublab and NTS, and recently released an album of field recordings from Pakistan on the Sublime Frequencies label. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Onassis AIR Fellowship.
Malik Gaines is associate professor of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch.
Lia Gangitano is Director of PARTICIPANT INC., New York.