Art Metropole

#12277

Black Light District

Artist

Andrew Zealley

Price

$50.00

Date

2015

Publisher

Disco Hospital Books & Records

Format

Artists' Books

Size

13 × 20.5 × 1.5 cm

Length

222 pgs

Genre

LGBTQ2S+, Performance Art, Photography, Theory

Black Light District documents a disturbed cleansing ritual: the solemn pouring of seven litres of India ink on full moon in June 2014. As an exploration of skrying—a divinational practice using the surface of smoked glass, mirror, or fluid— Black Light District interrogates processes of ceremonial cleansings in tension with knowledge construction around territories marked by the opaque. Is this knowledge, prophecy, protest, or analytical hoax? A veiled glance at HIV/AIDS, or undetectable? Bloodwork and pipelines; backrooms at the disco; condomless, magnetic. Black Light District pours ink because there is a water shortage. End times and the fortuneteller cannot read a thing for the murk.

Black Light District comprises photography, a dramaturgical video (with audio) in four parts, typography, and bookwork (edition of 50 numbered copies). Large-format photographs include video stills and staged compositions. The stills—some culled from unused video footage—imagine the more hallucinatory phases of skrying and specific junctures of oblivion or psychic transformation. The more formal images, like Being and Otherness (pictured), force intersectional meanings of magic, spirit, discoed existentialism, and drugs. Minimalist and slow-paced, the video (15 minutes, 30 seconds) is intended as a map to the ritual; and the divinational properties and imaginings conceivable within the pouring gesture and the turbidity of the ink.

Perfect-bound, numbered edition of 50, full colour.