UNDEAD ARCHIVE gathers three interdisciplinary artists—Cea (Constantine Jones), Theodore (ted) Kerr, and Eleanor Kipper—for an evening of readings and performances that grapple with the multiple relationships between viruses, archives, and art. Occuring on World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art, the night will engage with the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS while also opening onto broader questions of illness, media, memory, race, class, and queerness.
Constantine Jones is a Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & housed in Brooklyn. They are the coordinator of the Visual AIDS Oral History Project, THE BODY AS AN ARCHIVE, as well as a member of the collective, What Would An HIV Doula Do?. They are the author of the novel, IN STILL ROOMS (Operating System, 2020) & a collaborative chapbook with Portuguese visual artist Vicente Sampaio, BALEEN: A POEM IN TWELVE DAYS (Ursus Americanus, 2022). Their work has been performed or exhibited across NYC & Tennessee.
Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Canadian born, Brooklyn based, writer and organizer. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He is a founding member of the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018. Kerr is an adjunct instructor at The New School and Manhattan College.
Eleanor Kipping (she/they) is a Black Queer Brooklyn-based Artist, Educator and Arts Administrator, originally from Maine. Her multidisciplinary practice lies at the intersection of performance, installation and lens-based media and image making. Her work explores the notion of virus as Other at the intersection of race, gender, class and place with specific concentration on HIV. Through the examination and deconstruction of historical and contemporary narratives, she is interested in the public, private, and civic negotiations of race, gender, in addition to the effect and practice of violence and surveillance. She has been awarded residencies at the Lunder Institute for American Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, School of Visual Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is currently a 2023 Center for Performance Research Artist in Residence. Her work has been exhibited at The Shed, Portland Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival, and more. She is a Media Instructor at BRIC, the Marketing Manager at Hi-ARTS, and the Co-Founder of Camp El, a Maine-based artist retreat.