Know AIDS Now
What is AIDS, now? Or is it which AIDS? What is the now of AIDS and art? Or is it the why of art & AIDS? Which AIDS. Why art. Now. Ask it again. It won’t hold still.
Artist and AIDS activist Julie Tolentino and artist and trans theorist Eva Hayward ask these questions — through art, through writing, through an open conversation about the unquestionable. Opening with artworks and readings from both Tolentino and Hayward, they tangle with the invitation to share image and language side by side. Hate (erotic) and void (deselection) are some of their keywords. To further decipher these terms, the artists reflect on their own responses to invitations surrounding AIDS and aesthetics, including terms such as ruination and archive.
Hosted by ICA LA and as a conclusion to Tolentino’s participation in the inaugural year of the Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program, this evening will be introduced and engaged by UCLA English professor and Performance Studies scholar, Summer Kim Lee.
Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipinx-Salvadoran artist whose performance/installation practice explores the interstitial spaces of race, gender, relationality, and the archive. Expanding notions of durational, erotic practices, site, and movement, their collaborative projects include performance, installation, video, devised objects, scent, soundscapes, and texts drawn from essential outside learning spaces of activism, alterity, advocacy, loss, and care giving.
Projects include the 2022 Whitney Biennial, with Ivy Kwan Arce with a public program focused on the work of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective, Visual AIDS Duets book series with Kia LaBeija; Movements in Blue with WWHIVDD?; Archive in Dirt 2018, the Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky; and The Sky Remains The Same, a lifetime body-as-archive project (since 2006.)
Awards include MacDowell Residencies (2026, 2019); ICA LA Artist-in-Residence (2025-6); Guggenheim Fellowsh ...
Theorist and artist, Eva Hayward currently teaches at the University of New Mexico. Trained in the History of Consciousness tradition (UCSC, 2008), her scholarship focuses on science studies and visual culture with an emphasis on psychoanalytic semiotics. Hayward is a Fulbright Scholar (University of Graz, Austria) with postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and Uppsala University (Sweden). She has taught at the University of California, University of Cincinnati, University of Arizona, and Utrecht University (Netherlands). While also publishing in feminist science studies (such as the journals Cultural Anthropology, differences, Parallax, and Angelaki), Hayward’s most recent art writings on “trans as sexuality” have been published in Porn Studies, e-Flux, Texte Zur Kunst, as well as in museum catalogues, including the Whitney Museum (NY), the Institute for Contemporary Art (LA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), and the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wein (Vienna, ...
Summer Kim Lee is a writer and scholar specializing in feminist and queer theory, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Asian American art and culture. She is an associate professor of English at UCLA. Her first book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke University Press, 2025), examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Her writing appears in ASAP/Journal, Post45, Social Text, GLQ, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, among other venues.
