The event will be held via Zoom here.

Join us for a live screening performance by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger as part of their ongoing project DNCB. The title is an acronym for dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical created for use as a photochemical, but which was taken up in the ’80s and ’90s as an experimental topical treatment for AIDS, and/or AIDS-related opportunistic infections. The chemist who discovered this alternate use through self-experimentation campaigned for medical research into the substance, and was involved in founding the first independent guerrilla AIDS clinic. To date, Husain and Schroedinger’s project has taken on numerous configurations—as lecture performances, screenings, and in exhibitions—which Theodore (ted) Kerr explored in the pages of our most recent issue: 148, “Body Language” (Winter 2021).

The screening performance will be followed by a conversation between the artists and Andy Fabo, about his work as an artist and AIDS activist in the 80s and 90s, and a brief audience Q&A.

Read the “Body Language” editorial note here, and subscribe here.

Please submit any accessibility requests to info@cmagazine.com.

Join the event via Zoom.
Meeting ID: 884 2299 3464

Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto, Canada. Husain’s projects often begin with fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups.

Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working in performance-based moving image and sound performance. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and ideological certainties of representation. She researches the coinciding histories of industrialization and film. Her works and curatorial practice are often collaborative. Since 2017 she is a member of LaborBerlin, an artist-run analog film lab in Berlin.

Andy Fabo is an artist, art critic, independent curator, AIDS activist, and art educator. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art before moving to Toronto in 1975. He received his MFA from OCAD University in 2013.

Fabo’s paintings, drawings, and videos have exhibited widely nationally and internationally. In 2005 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art that featured over thirty years of work. The exhibition spanned the first mixed media paintings that he exhibited in his 1979 A Space show, Studs– a landmark for Queer art in Toronto- through the paintings from his time as a founding member of the influential ChromaZone collective (1981-85), through his activist and memorializing response to the AIDS epidemic of the late 80s and early 90s. In the former period Fabo began to make collaborative videos with his late partner, Michael Balser, and also expanded his practice into digital media. The video he made with Balser, Survival of the Delirious (1988), won numerous awards including ‘Best New Narrative’ at the Atlanta Film Festival and Kijkhuis Festival in Holland. It is also included in the Art Against AIDS anthology that V Tape in Toronto and Video Data Bank in Chicago co-produced. A retrospective of their collaborative work mounted at Oboro, Montréal in 2003.