Part visual essay, oral history and artist book, DNCB – A History of Irritation is a companion to the multi-channel installation DNCB by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger. The book plays with contrasting paper formats and materials, using glossy colourful video stills and distorted archival imagery to achieve a similar effect to the film, video and audio tracks in the installation. It gives more room to the informative and deeply touching interviews the artists did with AIDS activists and long-term survivors, and collects the archival research on DNCB for the first time in a publication. DNCB stands for Dinitrochlorobenzene. It is used in the development of analogue colour film. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the substance was also employed as a treatment in alternative AIDS clinics around the USA and Canada.
“The installation presents a hospitable body – a body that is knowingly porous, fluid, relational and embedded in a web of pleasures and threats, care and violence, toxicity and remediation, community and self-determination – the body as defiant knowledge and a body of boundless knowledge.” (Sylvie Fortin)
DNCB – A History of Irritation
Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger
Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto. His projects often begin with a fragment of history, a rumor, a per- sonal encounter or a distant memory. husain.de
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working in performance, film/video, and sound. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and the ideological certainties of representation. http://schroedinger.