I am thrilled that The Museum of Chinese in America / MOCA is featuring a series of my images from Winnie’s Bar. The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging will be on view from May 2 through September 15, 2019.

The show, is billed as a “lively and immersive exploration on [how] music in Chinese communities unites disparate histories – Cantonese opera; Asian American Movement music; Taiwan and Hong Kong pop music; karaoke; Beijing underground rock and others – to address the question: How does music reflect the experience of Chinese in America?”

Bonus feature: the title of the installation’s section in which the karaoke dive bar pics are showcased.

AMATEUR HOURS: Ecstatic Performance in Partying and Worship. Seriously!

A big Thank You! to Andrew Rebatta, Associate Curator at MOCA, for bringing me on board. The exhibition is co-curated by Rebatta, together with Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker, and MOCA’s Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Herb Tam.
 
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The “Welcome to Exilistan” exhibition has reopened, and our studio space includes a sound and video booth collecting oral histories – memories, stories, viewpoints – from the Afghan diaspora in Berlin.

The exhibit and studio space at Rosa Luxemburg Strasse 16 in Berlin Mitte.

Find out more about this project on our brand new Afghan Memories website, which will eventually feature the videos we are currently collecting.  For now, the studio space at Rosa Luxemburg Str. 16 in Berlin Mitte is becoming a home to the expanding Newsgroup Afghanistan team of young people, and a venue for talks and exchanges.  Ongoing infos, opening hours and announcements are best followed on our Facebook page.

Meanwhile, some more pics from behind the scenes of our Vernissage and events….

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I had the great fortune to connect with a wonderful participatory media project for young Afghans in Berlin when visiting the city briefly in August, and was able to join the team for the opening weekend of workshops. Now I am back in Berlin for the year, just in time to complete the project, which is turning into a beautifully realized exhibition at Box Freiraum in Friedrichshain.

More of the youth reporters’ work will be featured later on, once @EverydayMigration is up and running on Instagram and Medium, but for now, some behind the scenes images of the process and exhibition.

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Everyone loves Sithandizele, our first participant from Botswana!

In July, the Graying of AIDS team attended the International AIDS Conference in Durban for our third installment of creating portraits and collecting oral histories on aging and HIV/AIDS. Over the course of five super productive and stimulating days we were able to interview and photograph some amazing people from Botswana, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mauritania, Mexico, Namibia, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, Uganda, the United States, and Zimbabwe for the ongoing Stories From An Aging Pandemic archive.

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In honor of this year’s World AIDS Day, I decided to reach out to some of the former Camp Heartland kids who were featured in the OSF Moving Walls 11 exhibition, or had been profiled in the book that I co-produced for the HIV/AIDS NGO‘s peer prevention outreach. It has been 15 years since I first began photographing and interviewing teens who were facing the continuing stigma surrounding HIV, and all these years later, given our new sharing culture and social media connectivity, it seemed time to follow up.

The series ran over at the Open Society Foundation’s Instagram feed this week, presenting updates on the young people’s lives, as well as their thoughts on growing up, secrecy and disclosure, friendship and loss, and surviving against the odds. To be continued.

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Home run… The Graying of AIDS project’s Well Beyond HIV exhibit opened in NYC, capping quite a year for the traveling installation we produced for Walgreens. Now on to next things, after toasting new friends in person and larger than life size.

Thanks to POZ Magazine and Walgreens for hosting! Here’s a video and many more pics from the evening.

Next stop on the Walgreens / Graying of AIDS exhibit tour was San Francisco for one weekend in April, and below is a quick news round-up:

• Local news station KTVU interviews exhibit participants Greg and Sylvia.
• Some more background info via the San Francisco Chronicle.
• And a summation of the exhibition project by HIV Plus Magazine.

More news to follow, as this project continues….

I am thrilled to share the latest adventure in The Graying of AIDS project’s ongoing saga: we just launched a new collaboration with Walgreens, a national pharmacy chain that has been committed to HIV treatment and testing over many years. This month saw the Miami debut of Well Beyond HIV, a traveling exhibition and campaign featuring personal narratives and portraits of people living and aging with HIV.

This promises to be a great opportunity to reach new audiences and draw attention to the aging of the epidemic, and we’re super excited to find out where this project is going to keep going. For now, next step: San Francisco!! Go team!!

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Here’s a quick preview of our latest participatory Graying of AIDS installation at AIDS2015. But first and foremost, a HUGE Thank You!! to all of our backers and supporters during the whirlwind, last minute Indiegogo fundraiser that made it all possible.

As usual, we were much too busy producing new work and interacting with visitors to our installation site to do a thorough job of documenting our process. But here are some snapshots, and to sum it all up: going half way around the word to continue our global series on aging and HIV was worth it in every way imaginable, and we can’t wait to share some of the amazing new portraits and interviews.

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My video piece on surrogacy in India is presented as part of Browse Berlin Fotofestival‘s multimedia line-up in Berlin this month.