This program is curated as a part of the Circa: Queer Histories Festival Exhibition The Sky is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now! on view from September 28-October 31, 2025.
Ron Athey’s landmark performance addressing the condition of living with HIV/AIDS, Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, premiered at LATC and Highways Performance Space in a single week in 1993. A year later, the work would be presented at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, launching a torrent of misinformation that ignited a political firestorm in Congress.
In conversation with The Sky Is Always Falling curator Anuradha Vikram, Athey will present documentation of Four Scenes in a Harsh Life at LATC and other works in the accompanying Torture Trilogy including Deliverance (1994) which was never shown in its entirety in Los Angeles due to censorship. The conversation will address the aftermath and long-term consequences of Athey’s notoriety, the challenges of living and working as an artist with HIV/AIDS then and now, and the celebratory defiance that characterized 1990s HIV/AIDS activism.
Participant Bios:
Ron Athey has been working at the vanguard of performance art for 25 years. Self-taught, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. Their approach to performance art was informed by the club actions of Johanna Went and the formulation of Industrial Culture, the idea of psycho/neuro acoustics in sound performance. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection.
In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo and Incorruptible Flesh, a series of solo performances that reflect Athey’s collaborations with the late Lawrence Steger. Currently Athey is presenting Acephalous Monster, a performance with projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text and sound. Largely inspired by the secret society of Acéphale, Andre Masson’s design of a mascot, and drawing parallels between pre-Occupation 30s Paris with pre-Operation Spanner UK, the work is an attempt to make sense of a current reality where neo-fascism is mutating, creeping, and marching.
This program is organized by Anuradha Vikram and is co-presented with the Los Angeles LGBT Center as part of Circa: Queer Histories Festival 2025, presented by One Institute.
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