SCREENING ROOM: Alternate Endings, Chelsea Knight, Mark Tribe

From December 3 – 20, 2014, during gallery hours DiverseWorks will screen ALTERNATE ENDINGS and short films by Chelsea Knight and Mark Tribe.

Alternate Endings

ALTERNATE ENDINGS highlights the diverse voices of seven artists/collectives that use video to bring together charged moments and memories from their personal perspective amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.

Featuring videos by Rhys Ernst, Glen Fogel, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hi Tiger, Tom Kalin, My Barbarian, and Julie Tolentino.

The short videos in ALTERNATE ENDINGS use a mix of found footage, live performance, still photos, and robotic cameras to weave together connections between personal stories and public memories. They share tales of love and breakups, sing songs of defiance, celebrate action, and remember those whom we have lost. Through these diverse stories we are invited to reflect upon our complex past as we envision divergent narratives and possibilities for the future, because AIDS IS NOT OVER.

Conceived by Tom Kalin and Visual AIDS. Produced by Visual AIDS.

Visual AIDS presents ALTERNATE ENDINGS to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Day With(out) Art. On December 1, 1989, the first Day With(out) Art was created by Visual AIDS as a national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. 25 years later, ALTERNATE ENDINGS showcases provocative new works that reflect and respond to the ongoing AIDS pandemic.

View and share these videos online at: www.vimeo.com/visualAIDsync / #VisualAids / #DayWithoutArt / #AlternateEndings

Chelsea Knight

FRAME, 2014

In this video, a group of male and female construction workers assemble a steel structure while speaking from feminist theoretical texts and poems. The piece is shown inside a built construction environment mirroring the one in the video, and is accompanied by architectural photographs. Frame seeks to problematize the stereotypes of a traditionally male form of labor and other socially defined gender roles through the performance of feminist readings about women’s labor and the body. It also seeks to explore the ways we perform our class and gender, and how the relationships between men and women are written.

Fall to Earth, 2014

This project investigates the threshold between belief and doubt. It is a look at censorship through the lens of blasphemous or socially condemned speech in comparison to a believer’s religious or ecstatic speech. For the first scene of this project, Knight recreated the first scene of Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses”, in which the two main characters, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, fall from an exploded, hijacked airplane, transform into an angel and a satyr, and survive. The characters in the book utter blasphemous remarks, and the book itself was (and is still) banned in most of the Muslim world. As is common knowledge, a Fatwa was issued on Rushdie by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989.

I Lay Claim to You, 2009

In I Lay Claim to You, Knight invited choreographer Khalia Frazier to translate a text — appropriating themes from Margaret Mead’s 1938 description of a Balinese cremation —
into a dance. In an improvised rehearsal, Frazier and Knight perform attitudes of identification: claiming and reclaiming ownership of the dancers and of each other. The
dancers operate as a Chorus, mediating and transcribing the process. Knight conflate tropes of cultural inscription with the situation of a rehearsal to engage difference and
sameness as changeable, conditional and contested categories, whose instability is political.

Mark Tribe

The Port Huron Project:

The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008

Public reenactment of a speech given by activist and Black Panther Party member Angela Davis at DeFremery Park in Oakland, CA on November 12, 1969. Davis makes the case for a united movement that links imperialism abroad with domestic oppression. She calls for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, for the release of domestic political prisoners, and for the defeat and humiliation of the U.S. Government. Sheilagh Brooks delivered the reenactment speech in DeFremery Park on August 2, 2008.

Let Another World Be Born: Stokely Carmichael 1967/2008

Public reenactment of a speech originally given by Stokely Carmichael, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in front of the United Nations building in New York City on April 15, 1967. Carmichael argues that the Civil Rights movement must oppose the war in Vietnam, discusses the central role of genocide in American history, and issues a forceful call to organize against war, exploitation, and genocide. Ato Essandoh delivered the reenactment speech at Tudor City Plaze on September 7, 2008.

We Are Also Responsible: Cesar Chavez 1971/2008

Public reenactment of a speech given by Chicano labor leader and Civil Rights activist Cesar Chavez at a Vietnam veterans memorial rally at Exposition Park in Los Angeles on May 2, 1971. Chavez speaks about organizing migrant farm works, the importance of sacrifice for justice, and the need to offer youth an alternative to violence and war. Ricardo Dominguez delivered the reenactment speech at Exposition Park on July 19, 2008.