As part of the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978-1992, Listening Party brings the artist’s tape journals into the space of his photographic and filmic work. Amongst Wojnarowicz’s archival papers, which are held at Fales Library and Special Collection at New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, is a vast collection of audio journals on cassette tapes that he began in the early 1980s. The tapes document Wojnarowicz recalling long and complicated dreams, reflecting on love affairs, the New York art scene and, in later tapes, processing the death from AIDS of his best friend and mentor Peter Hujar in 1987, as well as of his own experience living with AIDS. Three tapes from this collection, marked with yellow masking tape and labelled CROSS COUNTRY / Great Dreams document the two westward trips Wojnarowicz took in 1989.

Join us on Thursday, January 23 to listen to David Wojnarowicz, Cross Country: Tape Journals, February-June 1989, a three-disc vinyl release documenting the artist’s thoughts, dreams, fears and environment during two separate road trips he took to the American Southwest and West Coast. In addition to having been deliberate about his intention to have his private journals posthumously published, Wojnarowicz was clear about the political implications of the very idea of the private-public divide: “Each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of a ONE-TRIBE NATION.”

The event will start at 5 pm with a short introduction by Sheila Giffen, whose research analyses forms of sacred address in literary and artistic responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis from the U.S. and South Africa. Afterwards, a selection from the tape journals will be played and a short discussion will follow.

All are welcome and admission is free as always.

Image (above): Andreas Sterzing, Untitled (David+Nest+Globe), 1989, photograph. Courtesy of the artist, the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.