Ocula’s global team of editors has selected the shows not to miss during July, from New York City’s abandoned 1980s waterfront to the majesty of a Soviet-era metro station.
David Wojnarowicz, Some Day This Will All Be Crumbling Ruins (until 28 August) at The Modern Institute, Glasgow
In David Wojnarowicz’s unpublished poem Circulating Drunk to Midnight Music from 1977, he depicted blood-stained street corners and monks stalking the river. The haunting imagery was his New York City: the abandoned waterfront piers, the queer communities that gathered at night. Wojnarowicz was a multidisciplinary artist and a radical AIDS activist who mapped the raw experience of outsider life in his paintings, photographs, writing and filmmaking. This exhibition in Glasgow traces this trajectory, from early street photography and collaborations to his relationship with Peter Hujar, through photographs, paintings, papier-mâchés and archival material, spanning the 1970s until his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1992. The Modern Institute’s weathered interior becomes part of that narrative: ephemera are tucked into old wooden cabinets, posters pinned to raw brick walls, and films projected in rooms that feel temporarily inhabited, evoking the networks of friendship, desire and collective making through which Wojnarowicz’s practice took shape. – Shanyu Zhong