Demian DinéYazhi’
An Infected Sunset, 2018, digital video, 4:50 min.
TheCube 7F
Demian DinéYazhi ’́ s An Infected Sunset consists of excerpts from the artist’s poem of the same name, layered over moving images of alternating bodies of sand and water. This source poem, conceived on the heels of the tragic massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, the threat of pipelines on sacred site at Standing Rock (#NoDAPL), and state-sanctioned executions of Black men, speaks truthfully to the uninhibited and intertwined horrors of the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, settler colonial state. In the video, DinéYazhi ́ speaks back at these violent legacies and the racist present to offer an invocation to queer intimacy, Indigenous knowledge-making and remembering, and shared resistance. More than an artist, DinéYazhi ́ is a truth teller.
Born to the clans of Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water) in New Mexico, DinéYazhi ́ is an artist, poet, curator, and founder of RISE: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. Their transdisciplinary practice spans poetry, performance, publication, and visual art making visible and legible the historical, unresolved, and continuing violence of colonization—as well as its current heteropatriarchal manifestations—for Indigenou knowledge and cosmology towards liberation and survivance.
－Curator｜PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Demian DinéYazhi’
(b. 1983, Gallup, United States; based in Portland) A Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post- apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.
Curator : PJ Gubatina Policarpio
(b. 1983, Gallup, United States; based in Portland) A Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post- apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.
