Ephemera As Evidence brings together visual art, performance, and pedagogical projects that evidence past lives and future possibilities in the work of artists confronting questions of the ephemeral, particularly those artists whose work grapples with HIV/AIDS. Thinking through the ephemeral as necessary to the political life of HIV, the exhibition acknowledges a larger history of silence and erasure while at the same time making salient strategies for survival and worldmaking potentials in the face of a violently phobic public sphere. Yet, to consider ephemera in relation to HIV/AIDS today is to consider both the burden and blessing of continued life. Within our contemporary moment the question is not merely one of survival but of how survival reverberates beyond the immediacy of a crisis. The works in this show ask us to consider how changing demographics of those affected by HIV/AIDS and the resulting reorientations to crisis force new kinds of temporalities in an engagement with both the past and the future.
The exhibition takes its title from a 1996 essay written by José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) as the introduction to the “Queer Acts” special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Muñoz’s essay was interested in the ways raced and queer bodies are often associated with the transitory and the ephemeral, and thereby barred from a sense of historical weight; as a performance studies scholar, he critiqued the methodological ideal of “rigor” as a tyrannical rhetoric by means of which the sciences— social, medical, and otherwise—imbued their objects with evidentiary solidity. It can be difficult to recall the texture the concept of the ephemeral took on during the mid-90s moment in which José wrote. The tidal wave of death precipitated by the AIDS pandemic brought new urgency to the ephemeral, especially where mourning was necessarily a political act, especially where mourning was necessarily a political act, year in which José’s essay was published, the grounds on which the ephemeral signified shifted dramatically with the advent of new drug treatments that began to reduce if not eradicate some of the traces of HIV/AIDS from the surface of the body, leaving our understanding of the evidentiary increasingly up to the hardened science of blood tests and expert detection. It seems, in fact, that the longer life appears to get, the shorter our patience grows with all those ephemeral things.
Invigorating the ephemeral with a renewed sense of Possibility, “Queer Acts” (and Munoz’s widely read first book, disidetifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 1999) served as an urgent reminder that the ephemeral, far from merely being a coveted product of a world in mourning, may actually hold the roots of another world. “Queer Acts” called on the reader to think about the ways in which lives leave traces outside of the more canonized forms of documentation and record keeping. The artists collected in Ephemera As Evidence similarly make a claim for the ephemerality of their own lives and the lives lived around them. More than half of the artists in this exhibit have been accessed through the Visual AIDS registry. A number have also been culled from the archive of José Muñoz himself. We invited artists with whom he did much of his thinking to contribute visual materials—queer acts in and of themselves that continue to reverberate with the urgency of the ephemeral. These works manifest both traces of the exhibited artists’ lives and evidence negotiations with lives that can not be claimed as their own, inviting us to witness transient moments of identification, inspiration and loss.
Ephemera As Evidence is organized according to three distinct yet interrelated modes of worldmaking—performance, intimacy, and pedagogy. The ephemeral projects collected and staged throughout the run of the show index loss and longing central to queer worlds and social formations. They help to challenge notions of inauthenticity often associated with the ephemeral, not merely using traces to reconstruct a past but also to imagine pasts or futures both longed for and Lost, finding new ways to tell untold stories. We present opportunities for visitors to visually and somatically engage with the art works and have constructed an explicitly performative experience in which ephemeral elements reinforce the materiality of the exhibition space as an evershifting environment, continually reconstituted in relation to each body that passes through it. Showcasing moments of live performance (as well as evidence of its potential and absence) and student encounters in the archive, the exhibit explores powerful modes of learning that arise in the apprehension of slippery and contingent realities.