DEATH IN VENICE

Death in Venice is a site-specific installation that situates the artist’s queer body at the center of various translations and adaptations of Thomas Mann’s queer-coded novella Death in Venice (1912). Surrounding the room are floor-to-ceiling, hand-dyed grey drapes, while in the center stand two 4 × 8-foot plexiglass sheets supported by metal frames. The plexiglass sheets are illuminated by back projection, which serves as the only light source in the gallery. Two projected videos loop continuously throughout the day: the horizontal projection consists of selected frames from the ending of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), while the vertical projection is a deep-fake video merging my own facial movements with the Aschenbach character’s face from Visconti’s film.

The former video is silent, except for a slow, melodic version of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which was prominently featured in Visconti’s film. The latter video, however, presents a series of short speeches containing texts from various translations and adaptations of Death in Venice—from Mann’s novella to Visconti’s film, Britten’s opera, and several quotes that scholars claim inspired the original novel.