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Photos from a visit of Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, exhibition at Vienna Secession, 2025

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William Blake, The Inscription over the Gate, 1824-27

"In his Divine Comedy, Dante describes the pilgrimage he made with the poet Virgil, travelling into Hell, up the Mountain of Purgatory to reach Paradise at last. Entering the Gate of Hell was a moment when Dante (in red) wept with fear. 

Dante describes the ‘dim’ colours which contribute to his terror. Blake’s dark shadows of pure black pigment next to areas of unpainted white paper contribute to this. He used Prussian blue for the blue areas, and indigo blue mixed with yellow for the green foliage, so that they contrast. The blue, green and vermilion red do not overlap." – Tate Modern

"Dante is being led by Virgil, the Roman poet, through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Here they are shown entering the Gate of Hell. Once inside, they shall first pass through the region where the souls of the uncommitted (those who lived their lives without doing anything notably good or bad) reside. They shall then be ferried by Charon across the river Acheron into Hell proper. Virgil is the right-hand figure in blue, Dante the left-hand one in grey [or red?, see above, haha].

Notice how the greenery framing the outside of the gate contrasts with the bleak panorama of fire and ice inside. If you look carefully you can see tiny figures in torment on the hills. These successive hills represent the different circles of hell, where the souls of people guilty of different sins are punished in an appropriate manner. Those guilty of the sin of lust, for example, are buffeted about by the winds of passion and desire in the second circle." - other page of Tate Modern, lol

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Every Ocean Hughes, One Big Bag, 2021. Single-channel video and installation

"Every Ocean Hughes’s One Big Bag (2021) reckons with end-of-life care for the newly deceased and those who love them. At once useful, political, and poignant, a death doula (performed by Lindsay Rico) guides us through a mobile toolkit of everyday items used to clean and care for corpses. Instructive and forcefully delivered, the monologue reveals how cotton swabs, textiles, feminine hygiene products, medicines, and combs, among other objects, are repurposed to practical and often profound ends. In the immersive film installation, these objects are suspended at heights corresponding with their relationship and use to the body. Together, the projected film and everyday items convey the complex realities and communal possibilities of caring for the dead while highlighting important debates around end-of-life practices, including the high costs of funerals—a death industry that curtails individual agency—and inequalities in medical care."

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William Blake, Dante running from the three beasts, 1824-1827

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"If the state is a nationalization of identity, a congruence between the shared community of the nation and the territoriality of state borders, then the regulation of population attaches itself to the demographic desires of a given Westphalian project. What brings together the black American family in the United States and the Palestinian family in Palestine is the state’s investment in their respective destruction, the elevated production of risk, and the calculable increase in the likelihood of mortality, “natural” or otherwise. To acquiesce to one’s own death is to perform good citizenship, to respect the state’s logic of management and its enactment of the Darwinian natural order. Ironically, to refuse annihilation is to have a death wish and to accept the targeting of one’s own body and one’s community as retribution by the state."

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Leilah Babirye

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Installation view: Hans Josephsohn: Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, 2024–25. Courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Photo: Pierre Antoine / Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

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"Der eigentliche politische Akt oder die eigentliche politische Handlung bestehen darin, soviel Freundschaft wie möglich zu stiften (hervorzubringen, herzustellen, etc.). [...] Sie ist ein Akt, bevor sie eine Situation ist, der Akt dessen, der liebt, eher und früher als der Zustand dessen, der geliebt wird. Zuerst eine Handlung, dann eine Passion." – Derrida, Politik der Freundschaft

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"Where do you see the new book fit into the trajectory of your life’s work? I think I remain obsessed with the same themes. Each time, I think I am writing a different book, but I am wrestling with the same core set of issues. Wayward Lives is a different kind of formal experiment than Lose Your Mother, but it too is concerned with the form adequate to conveying the story of these unknown and anonymous radicals. Like Scenes of Subjection, it too considers the ways that forums of violence and dispossession yield other kinds of social formations, and the other set of possibilities that might and do reside in these formations, when we’re not all trying to be a subject, or a Mrs. I think that there’s a critical continuity in terms of the issues that concern me, and I think an ongoing set of formal questions."

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ROBERT MORRIS, The Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961

HANS HAACKE, Condensation Cube, 1963-68

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[“Love inscribes the body— and this is a process as excruciating as it sounds. For some of us it is literal, Kafkaesque. A selbst-verlusting that is both terrifying and pleasurable. The body does not pre-exist love, but is cast in its fires.”]

jordy rosenberg, confessions of the fox

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Jordy Rosenberg on writing Confessions of a Fox / different approaches to sexuality

"I also felt stuck in terms of what I felt was a polarity in queer studies or approaches to sexuality at the time I was writing [Confessions], which really started in 2010. As far as I understood it, there were two main contradictory orientations in approaches to sexuality: one was seeing sexuality as a form of deviance, but ontologically so; and then sexuality as a modality of state power. To put it another way: sexuality as a site of discipline and control, or sexuality as a kind of germ seed of chance and contingency. To me this was the result of divergent opinion in the field as to what sexuality as an object of study is. This is a reduction on my part, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that we could bookmark this split around a Foucauldian trajectory which sees sexuality as a vector as power, and a new materialist orientation towards sexuality, especially transsexuality, as something that involves a hopeful embrace of trans as a kind of ur-vitalism.

This is something a colleague and friend of mine Kadji Amin and I were talking about a lot at the time I was writing. Kadji describes transness as sometimes being embraced in trans studies as a primary vitality underlying all of being and life – a kind of ahistorical, pre-ontological force. There’s this tendency to want to exempt transness from history, or at least from the balefulness, or the more unsavoury aspects, of history. Kadji points out there’s a real tension there between wanting to see transness as prior to power, and then the Foucauldian understanding of vitality and vitalism as produced by biopower. And so I was having a hard time finding out how to do queer studies within that framework, and I couldn’t figure out a way to academically intervene. 

In a way, I did want to do some of the Foucauldian work of not exempting transness from the balefulness of history, and so [in Confessions] I was trying to attach transness to questions of the birth of biopolitics and of the modern Western medical tradition – and that takes place at the level of plot in the book. But I also wanted to leave a place for a utopian urge that, with some exceptions, hasn’t really had an easy time in queer studies, and that has to do with a utopian Marxist tradition which has historically seen sexuality as naming a node within the field of reproduction and the affective, psychic and embodied life of the subject, or sexuality as naming the intersection of the field of collective action with that of state power and the juridical. So for me the Marxist trajectory – not that this has always been well-articulated within Marxism; it’s taken a lot of queer and feminist scholars to bring this out – can see sexuality as potentially marking a site of active contestation with the state and with capital and reproductive accumulative logic. I wanted to neither go the vitalist tradition nor a strictly Foucauldian tradition, but to write a text that would open a place for thinking through some of the dynamics of sexuality as a mode of conflict and contestation."

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Damit Ihr mal wisst, wie ich aussehe (in guten Zeiten, bzw. solchen von spektakulärem Schmerz, „exalting pain“, der ja seltsamerweise auch ordentlich die Lebensgeister weckt und den Körper durchblutet)