Each and Every Gesture Carries a Reverberation

An evening of readings and performance in collaboration with PPOW Gallery and the Wojnarowicz Foundation commemorate the would-be 70th birthday of David Wojnarowicz (1954 -1992), the countercultural artist, writer, poet, and activist, whose work continues to be of utmost relevance in our world today.

To mark the occasion, we bring 10 artists, curators, writers, scholars, and editors to the Museum to select and present works from David's monumental archive. The gallery is then activated by composer and musician Ben Neill for a performance of ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion), a collaboration between the musician and the artist David Wojnarowicz. Originally presented as a live multimedia performance at The Kitchen in 1989, the piece binds the haunting urgency of Wojnarowicz’s words to a sinister, elastic composition by Neill. This screening will mark the first time Neill has played alongside the film in six years, most recently performing a live score as part of Wojnarowicz’s retrospective at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018. The musical piece will be followed by a brief reception, with select works from the Museum’s holdings on display in celebration of David’s legacy.

This celebration is amongst a series of events PPOW and the Wojnarowicz Foundation have organized in celebration of the late artist’s life and work. Spanning venues across New York City—including the Museum of Modern Art, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and New York City AIDS Memorial—and beyond, the festivities will bring together multiple generations of artists, performers, musicians, and speakers to showcase Wojnarowicz’s original artworks, and reify the relevance of his practice more than thirty years after his untimely passing from AIDS-related illness in 1992.

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