DANIEL REY AT THE KOPPEL PROJECT: "I WANT TO DISCUSS HOW QUEER PEOPLE CONNECT"
Collective Cuddles (2023). Performance. Selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023. Image: René Lazovy
Like certain events, people, or circumstances, there are books which divide our lives into before and after.
Once a month, I pick up Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) by David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992), an American interdisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker and AIDS activist whose words speak to me on a particularly visceral level. It is such a phenomenal piece of writing with so much fury and anger but also empathy and tenderness that in my copy of it, almost every single line is underlined, highlighted or annotated. In one of those, Wojnarowicz writes: “When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body to do.”
What Time Leads The Willing Body To Do is also the title of the first solo show of Venezuelan artist Daniel Rey (b. 1990). Intrigued by this connection, I take my companion - the memoir - by the hand and head to Rey’s studio at KOPPEL Project in Chalk Farm, just above the exhibition, to discuss the inspiration behind it.
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