David Wojnarowicz
Following the life of artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty who was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic's unfathomable death toll.
An oral history of Artists Space, the legendary New York artists organization. Told through the voices of the artists, critics and curators who formed it, the film is narrated by voiceover culled from 30 hours of archival cassette tape interviews over a 45 year period. Artists such as Laurie Anderson, Mike Kelley, Hito Steyerl and David Wojnarowicz walk us through the decades. A formally-experimental and raucously-told chronology composed of rare archival documentation, The Business of Thought... is a reminder of the radical potential of the arts and the importance of collective, cultural spaces.
Political artist, painter, writer, performer and photographer David Wojnarowicz was one of the leading personalities of the 1980s New York art scene. In an interview conducted in 1989 by cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer, Wojnarowicz speaks candidly about intimate moments in his life, the creative process, sexuality, AIDS, and coming to terms with one’s own death - at a time when society categorically refused to face up to the AIDS epidemic.
Inspired by the autobiographical writings of David Wojnarowicz, "Postcards From America" chronicles the abuse the artist suffered as a child at the hands of his father and his subsequent running away to New York to become a street hustler.
A road movie with David Wojnarowicz guiding the viewer through the images of a rough and disturbed America.
Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary Queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality, dislocated from ‘real time’, into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss and anger is palpable.
ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) is a multimedia performance collaboration created by artist David Wojnarowicz and composer/musician Ben Neill in 1989. Integrating music, text, and video in a multi-dimensional format, the work embodies the act of acceleration and its sensory manifestations. It is through this frame that Wojnarowicz addressed the accelerating AIDS crisis and the politics of AIDS in the United States at that moment.
Phil Zwickler interviews David Wojnarowicz about a NEA project grant for a gallery show.
Experimental short film that explores themes of religion, violence, and gender/masculinity.
An exploration concerning the act of revealing to a potential lover that one is seropositive to HIV, the virus believed to cause AIDS.
Beautiful People was one of the last films David Wojnarowicz made before his death. The film follows Jesse Hultberg as he makes himself up in drag and ventures out onto the streets of New York, then beyond the city limits to a quiet lakeside.
A series of short films by Richard Kern: Stray Dogs, Woman At The Wheel, Thrust In Me, & I Hate You Now.
Loosely based on an infamous 1984 Long Island murder case involving Satan-worshiping, teenage drug freaks (Knights of the Black Circle), David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner’s Where Evil Dwells is a low-budget D.I.Y. movie that walks the jagged lines between splatter flick, experimental film and transgressive art. The original footage was destroyed in a fire and the only footage that survived is this 28 minute preview that was put together for the Downtown New York Film Festival in 1985.
A girl (Lung leg) bristles at the religious directives of her parents, asserting her right to personhood outside demure hairstyles and turkey dinners, constructing voodoo dolls and entertaining other manners of dark drawing in her dank emo-den. When confronted with the humanity and hypocrisy of her tormentors, the young antihero vanquishes their belief systems (and bodies) asserting, “You killed me first!”
Brutally abused by his parents, teenage Thomas finds comfort in associating with a film director who is making a documentary about physical child abuse. The two fall in love, and the elder is faced with the decision of either running away with Thomas or focusing on his career and thereby letting the boy possibly be beaten to death.
A crumbling pier, its walls covered with graffiti and erotic frescoes reminiscent of pagan Pompeii, the locus of the seduction rituals of men longing for men, is the focus of this meditation on gay cruising at the height of sexual freedom before AIDS. Shot in 1982, this is the first segment of a film capturing the life, death, and rebirth of the legendary “sex piers” over the last three decades.
Promises: Through Congress is a collaboration between Julie Mehretu, electronic music composer Floating Points aka Sam Shepherd, and filmmaker Trevor Tweeten. This 46-minute film features Mehretu’s expansive painting Congress (2003) and Promises (Luaka Bop, 2021), the acclaimed album from Floating Points and jazz titan Pharoah Sanders featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. Filmed on location at The Broad in Los Angeles.
