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Transmission

27 November 2013

Transmission

We're live streaming Tony Oursler's contemporary art project on HIV/AIDS for the next three nights

Ahead of World AIDS Day on 1 December, Kiev-based charity "The Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation" present Where There's a Will, There's a Way. This year sees the tenth anniversary of the foundation and with AIDS now becoming one of the most dangerous and rapidly growing epidemics in Ukraine, the exhibition aims to bring the disease into contemporary artistic discourse. 

For three nights, starting tonight, the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev will be transformed by artist, Tony Oursler for Transmission. Interacting with a giant projection screen and several participants, Oursler's Transmission will play a game with participants to create an audio-visual representation of language's viral essence. Likening language to a biological virus, Oursler's participants will speak English, Ukrainian and Russian in a sophisticated "telephone game" style.

Oursler, a New York-based artist, whose work is centred around the human psyche and its transmutations, says of the project: “Fear, superstition and ignorance surround this plague, much like those of the past. This cultural component of HIV, of misinformation surrounding it, can be seen as having viral properties too in this Information Age.”

The main exhibition will open on 16 November, featuring an impressive roster including several Dazed favourites among the mix of international and Ukrainian talent with Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei and Nan Goldin exhibiting. Each artists has, in some form, encountered the impact of AIDS – Ai Weiwei's "Love Is In My Blood", originally commisioned for the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 2013 campaign, will feature along with Félix González-Torres’ sculptures of his partner, Ross Laycock who died of an AIDS-related illness.