Kathleen Langjahr
Kathleen Langjahr is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn.
This book allows images and text to inform each other through proximity, providing the reader with a key to the ideas explored onscreen. These juxtapositions reveal the continuity of certain frictions throughout Ahwesh’s filmography, particularly the relationship between death, sexuality, and the mediation of our perception of reality by both social and technological apparatuses.
Divided into two cycles—the second cycle began streaming on Juneteenth—the exhibition presented a wide range of videos and performances by younger contemporary artists punctuated by a few historical works that function as both a critical framing device and a daunting attestation of the enduring cultural and political failures that have been inherited by the current generation.
Musing on the accumulative, highly malleable nature of individual and social identity, the works in the Kadist Video Library’s most recent online “episode,” AP: Assembled Personalities, provide a trenchant framework through which we may examine the confluence of material and virtual practices that define our current reality.
As COVID-19 continues to proliferate throughout New York City, forcing all art institutions to remain closed to the public, museums and galleries have been scrambling to convert their programming to an online-only format. A standout example of this adaptation is P.P.O.W.’s current presentation, Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head.
Including previously unpublished material from as early as 1969, this collection offers not only a thoroughly-researched selection of early Acker texts, but also a compelling addition to the extant criticism, providing detailed insight into the creative processes that entwined the author’s life and writing.
