Body as Medium
Queer Lineages of Duration, Resonance, Excess
September 23 — December 15, 2024

This gallery contains a durational performance-installation developed by Julie Tolentino, BAI Visiting Associate Professor of the Practice, in collaboration with students enrolled in her Fall 2024 course “Body as Medium: Queer Lineages of Duration, Resonance, and Excess.”

Julie Tolentino (lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA; she/they) is a Filipinx-Salvadorean artist whose work extends across durational performance, movement, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. Over the past several decades Tolentino has created a singular body of work made in intimate response to the learning spaces of HIV/AIDS activism, underground nightlife, alternative sexual cultures, and queer rituals of mourning and caregiving. Her artistic practice occupies interstitial spaces of relationality and memory, race and empire, sexuality and the archive.

Within this gallery is a continuously evolving performance-installation that will be activated by Tolentino and her students throughout the fall semester. Each week, objects, bodies, light, sound, voices, and projections will be reconfigured in response to the pedagogical and creative energies of the class to open a queer, intergenerational proposition to the archive. Expanding upon Tolentino’s 2019 installation work Repeater, there is no “outward” performance exhibited in this space. Instead, micro-actions produce tremors that keep the room changing, moving, shifting, reconfiguring. Disguised as trivial durational placeholders or a dreamer’s haptic escape, these “deep dives” accelerate the quotidian through inquiries into the inner logic of movement, making and remaking temporary structures—bodies, constructions, fabulations, queer habitats—that form sparse yet generous worlds, demolished before they can fully emerge into visibility. Seen or unseen, legible or not, Tolentino's performances reopen disappeared spaces for disappeared bodies to get a foothold, wander, and change, regaining other forms of temporality through interloping interventions among dissembling surfaces.

Visitors are welcome to explore inside the Cohen Gallery when its entrance is open, and to view the gallery from outdoors at other times. Please do not touch or move any of the pieces in the space.

Tolentino’s residency at Brown will include the final performance of her durational work HONEY (2011—) on Thursday, October 17, 2024 in the Granoff Center’s Fishman Studio as part of the Elemental Media Conference and will culminate in QUEER DURATIONS, a multi-day symposium that will take place at the Granoff Center from December 5 — 7, 2024. 

Julie Tolentino’s residency is supported by the Brown Arts Institute, the Departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM), Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS), and the Pembroke Center Faculty Seed Grant Program. This project is organized by faculty curator Leon J. Hilton (Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies) and Thea Quiray Tagle (Associate Curator, The Bell + Brown Arts Institute).

The artist wishes to acknowledge the following individuals:

Jayna Brown, Ian Budish, Olanda Estrada-Dos Santos, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Leon Hilton, Melissa Kievman, Kate Kraczon, Courtney Lau, Susannah Pierce, Thea Quiray Tagle, Jessica Wasilewski, as well as Brown Arts Institute and the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies