Hosted by WRRQ, The Visual Resistance (TVR) Community Action Forum is an open, interactive gathering where artists and other creative activists organize to resist oppressive policies. United by our belief that images are part of greater movement-building, this will be an evening to connect, build community, and share ideas, skills, and knowledge to support communities on the frontlines of attack.
The TVR forum will be followed by an informal social hour featuring a short analog projection performance titled Reflectus by WRRQ artist Chris Berntsen. Reflectus is a projection collage that combines one man’s 1970’s personal queer archive with the artist’s contemporary queer imagery to explore themes of intimacy and connection that transcend time.
Conversations will include: Hate-Free Zones, American History Revisited/Radical Education, TVR News (a web TV series in development), a youth-led Production House (meets every Friday at ICP), System Reboot/Imagine Liberation, Institutional Resistance (museums & curators & beyond), Distribution & Digital Security.
This event is part of a series of in-person activities produced in conjunction with the exhibition Collective Thinking, For Freedoms.
WRRQ is an intergenerational community of artists and activists united in queerness who wrrq to transform our culture. Our core actions include community-building, activism, art, video, fashion, and food justice. Many of us connected at the homeless youth shelter guided by the spirit of Sylvia Rivera where many of us have spent time, or by collaborating on large-scale art projects in queer and trans spaces. Not every collective member is involved in every project and our individual work continues freely, yet a shared sense of queer family runs throughout all the wrrq we collaborate on. Every summer we retreat to the mountains for Arts in the Woods, an intergenerational residency where we co-create with queer artists surviving homeless shelter systems. Our parent organization, Allied Productions, connects us to rich queer activist history in the Lower East Side, where they operate a community garden refuge (Le Petit Versailles) to gather, perform, and share wrrq. Together, we dream of shifting American culture away from violence, misogyny, and transphobia towards interdependence, restorative justice, accountability, and self-determination.