5/4 and F.R.DAVID
Black Sun
Performance and book launch

10.30 pm

5/4 performance

11 pm

F.R.DAVID Black Sun book launch

Will Holder and Chris Evans

A thirty-minute interpretation of a five-minute song, 5/4, from 1982, by 3 Teens Kill 4 (Brian Butterick, Julie Hair, Jesse Hultberg and David Wojnarowicz). The song is a homo-erotic description of torture at the hands of the police, sung by Will Holder, with Chris Evans on bass guitar.

5/4 is the song’s time-signature, to which most people would find it hard to dance. “Everything is so speeded up anyway, it feels like a piece of me is always moving in one and a quarter time to every­one else’s one. Do you feel like that?” Audre Lorde asks Pat Parker, alongside the lyrics to 5/4, featuring in Black Sun… .

Afterwards: Launch of the 17th issue of F.R.DAVID, a typographical journal dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. Black Sun is edited in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, to accompany the exhibitions David Wojnarowicz Photography & Film 1978–1992, Reza Abdoh, and TIES, TALES AND TRACES. Dedicated to Frank Wagner, Independent Curator (1958–2016).

The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis, and anger at the US government for their willful neglect of this loss. The issue assembles a chorus of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love and intimacy in linguistic, architectural and bodily structures, all the while under threat of collapse. These voices are threaded together with excerpts from Julia Kristeva’s white, feminist, psychoanalytical, semiotic Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia (1992).

F.R.DAVID is co-published by uh books and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

The event takes places within the context of the exhibition David Wojnaworicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992.