In a tribute to tenderness, we invite you to spend time with us on Saturday 26 November (17:00-20:00) amongst new and old fallen leaves that make up the artwork Si hot c’est toujours les water mêmes qui gagnent, cold y’a jamais de shoulder revanche (2015-present) by artist and curator Jo-ey Tang. He will share with us a 38-minute recording from one of the phone answering machine cassette tapes of the late American artist David Wojnarowicz — one that was clearly labeled “Time period of Pete’s Death.” 

“Pete” refers to the artist Peter Hujar, who was a mentor and one-time lover of Wojnarowicz. Hujar is known for his intimate black-and-white portraits of friends and artists in Downtown New York in the late 1970s and 1980s, including many iconic portraits of Wojnarowicz. In turn, Wojnarowicz took a set of photos of Hujar who died of AIDS-related illness on his deathbed in 1987. In these voice messages recorded around that time, concerned friends asked to visit Hujar at the hospital, interwoven with other mundane messages such as an urgent request from a gallerist to frame artwork, and one from either a wrong dial or a caller who intimated a past erotic encounter with Wojnarowicz yet calling him by a different name. As duo portraits of Wojnarowicz and Hujar, the messages articulate a complex oscillation of life and death, personal and professional commitments and pleasures, intimacies and friendships.

For this occasion, Tang will also release several belt-ends into the leaves of Si hot c’est toujours les water mêmes qui gagnent, cold y’a jamais de shoulder revanche, which will become part of the artwork from now on. He has collected these remnants torn from the tension of repeated everyday uses on his body.

Jo-ey Tang continues to address the nature of time and temporality in both his curatorial work and artistic practice, often by sharing and resharing his own and other artists’ artworks in different sets of circumstances in order to allow multiple meanings to emerge while reflecting on how the acknowledgment of commitments and limits can be useful in the understanding of and being with art and the individuals who take part in it. 

We invite you to share a light supper with us as part of the listening event. Please note that the recording will only be played once during the course of the listening session. The audio recording is made possible courtesy of the David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.