StoreVisual AIDS is thrilled to announce that Colombia-born, Taiwan-based curator and artist J Triangular will be our seventh annual Curatorial Resident, co-sponsored with Residency Unlimited. During the residency, J Triangular will create a weekly episodic video program called “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING” focusing on women living with HIV and AIDS. In J Triangular’s words, “This will be a program with guest writers, artists and live music, to intervene in the media apartheid that has made invisible or almost erased women’s perspectives from the HIV narrative.” Here, J Triangular outlines their upcoming residency:
J Triangular, Visual AIDS' seventh annual curatorial resident. Photo by Chen An-An.
I am an independent curator, queer poet, experimental filmmaker / DIY video artist, and photographer making art projects that speak about resistance, gender dynamics and memory landscapes. My work often consists of poetic portraits of the unresolved social violences of history, and the rupture of identity in a culture of manufactured fear and legally institutionalized discrimination.
My project for the Visual AIDS / Residency Unlimited Curatorial Residency will be a weekly public access TV show called “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.” Every week, we will create and upload a new episode of queer AIDS media to the Visual AIDS vimeo, renewing a sense of urgency to continue to make the HIV/AIDS crisis a priority. With television, radio and newspapers as primary sources of information about HIV/AIDS, stigma develops from misinformation and misunderstanding of the disease. Today, television channels deserve special mention in creating civic apathy. Referencing a slogan of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING'' will aim to once again counter stigma and promote safe sex through media.
This weekly TV program will have a main focus: women living with HIV. The lack of critical attention that has been given to HIV-positive women inspires the creation of “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.” This will be a program involving women living with HIV, centering women of color and trans women, featuring guest writers, artists, and live musicians. I feel deeply inspired by the video activist collective DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television), pioneers in the AIDS activist video movement. And in words of the Chilean writer Lina Meruane, HIV-positive women suffer "the syndrome of disappearance." Producing and broadcasting our own weekly TV show, we will make visible the stories of women living with HIV. After the weekly TV shows, the transmissions will continue in Taipei, Taiwan and Medellín, Colombia, with the help of independent art spaces.
My work consistently addresses themes including counterculture and music, queer community identity and self-empowerment, radical forms of queer memory and resistance, social transformation, art and collective action with the use of accessible technologies, camcorder activism, promoting communication and links of solidarity. I often aim to activate social consciousness and emotional compassion, cementing community bonds and transforming shame and guilt into something positive.
In 2014, I created a queer music and film festival in Chile with my brother Diego Barrera and our TV and film collective Celestial Twins. The project, called “Celestial Festival,” connected transgender identity with music, and featured a live concert by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, screenings of work by Joey Arias and Tara Transitory aka One Man Nation, and educational workshops. I have also spent time in New York through a residency at Flux Factory, during which I was the film curator for monthly benefit parties for Planned Parenthood and, together with Cayla Lockwood, created RUB, a now-wave zine focusing on queer countercultural pioneers.
With “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING,” I hope to create a space—a stigma-free environment—to counter the exclusion of women from vital discussions about HIV. Intervention, prevention, and collaborative artistic expression are vital in these times.
