The Department of Media Study’s PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, Screenings of Media Artists)​ will feature a conversation with Gregg Bordowitz. The Zoom Meeting ID for the lecture series is 959 5554 2975. Email paigesar@buffalo with PLASMA2021 in the subject line for password.​

Since the late 1980s, writer, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz has made diverse works— essays, poems, performances, drawings, sculpture, and videos—that explore his Jewish, gay, and bisexual identities within the context of the ongoing AIDS crisis. A professor and director of the Low-Residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bordowitz was an early participant in New York’s ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded various video collectives, including Testing the Limits, an advocacy group within ACT UP, and DIVA (Damn Interfering Video Activists). While developing a visual language capable of communicating harm-reduction models to a broad public in his collaborative works, he made his own videos and television broadcasts, such as some aspect of a shared lifestyle (1986) and Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), that juxtaposed performance documentation, archival footage, role play, and recordings of protest demonstrations, drawing influence from feminist conceptual art. In recent years, Bordowitz has increasingly introduced poetry and performance as art events. A retrospective of his work entitled ​Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well was presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. In the fall of 2020, Bordowitz produced a three-part advice show entitled Answers with Questions ​for Triple Canopy available to watch online here.

Monday’s conversation will also feature Liz Park, Curator of Exhibitions at UB Art Galleries. Park arrived at UB in the fall of 2019, after having been an Associate Curator of the 2018 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art.

As always, PLASMA lectures are free and open to the UB community and the public.​ Email paigesar@buffalo with PLASMA2021 in the subject line for password and/or additional information.

Brief remarks addressed to the students who are enrolled in PLASMA as a credit-course will begin at 6:00PM sharp. As a result, the guest lectures often begin a little later than 6:00.

PLASMA is sponsored by the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study and funding is provided by the the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The series is curated by Dr. Paige Sarlin, Assistant Professor of Media Study, in collaboration with Liz Park – UB Art Galleries and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center.

For more information: https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/media-study/news-events/plasma.html

The recordings of previous presentations can be found on MediaStudy@UB’s PLASMA 2021 YouTube Channel​.​​​