creative expression, and shared joy. As the words, beats, and neon shades pulsate through our bodies and animate our senses, we too are momentarily initiated into the liberated community of viewers, listeners, movers, and shakers produced by the work. In an entirely different context, the artist P. Staff finds such energizing transgenerational community at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles through repeated visits, observation, conversations, and archival access. While The Foundation (2015) was made well before Covid-19, it emerged in the continuing shadow of HIV/AIDS, as artists across generations were addressing its ongoing impact on culture, lived experience, networks of care and solidarity, and the construction of identity. As diverse figures, histories, and aesthetic practices are brought into dialogue, both within this work and in the exhibition at large, the resulting constellation reveals modes of memorialization— of paying homage —that disturb canonicity and heroization through constant creative reinterpre- tation. They intervene into established genres of commemorative image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging. A different set of interlocutors and antecedents informs the works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Carolyn Lazard as they engage the formal structures and characteristics of experimental film and early video. Divergent legacies of these avant-garde forms of the 1960s and 1970s surface in their contemporary works, including issues of perception and disability. Lazard’s Red (2021) includes a strobe sequence created using an iPhone camera and the artist’s finger, directly riffing on the methods deployed
RATTANAMOL SINGH JOHAL fzal Ahmad is Shireen and A ory ofessor of Hist ssistant Pr sian Arts and A Professor of South A , he . Most recently Ann Arbor ersity of Michigan, of Art at the Univ at The Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP ed co-curat vener of the t, New York. He is also the con Museum of Modern Ar a. olkat er Curators’ Hub 2025 in K Experiment
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