ITSOFOMO (in the shadow of forward motion) combines film clips seen throughout Wojnarowicz’s filmography, including footage of Beluga whales and other animals at the Coney Island Aquarium; Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City; ants crawling on a crucifix; and Wojnarowicz sewing his mouth closed in protest of public silence around AIDS in the United States.

The visceral, flickering imagery is accompanied by a sparse, yet swelling soundtrack by Ben Neill and voiceover of Wojnarowicz reading excerpts of his texts including “Living Close to the Knives” and “When I Put My Hands on Your Body.” Wojnarowicz’s enraged and increasingly hoarse voice details his deeply personal and political experiences with AIDS and the government’s complicity in tens of thousands of deaths.

As a multimedia performance piece, ITSOFOMO premiered at The Kitchen on December 7, 1989. The immersive performance featured Neill’s live soundtrack, readings, video, slide projection, papier-maché sculptures, and dance, presented at an accelerating pace that sensorially emulated the increasing emergency of the AIDS epidemic. In Wojnarowicz’s words: “Consider that you’re in a car speeding along on an expressway. Everything that you see out of the corner of your eye which doesn’t register [while you’re] in the pursuit of speed…It’s all the things quietly occurring, within absence of sight.”

Subsequent versions of ITSOFOMO were performed at the Center for Contemporary Art, Seattle; the San Francisco Art Institute; Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Exit Art, New York City. In 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art reprised the performance, including a new four channel version, as part of the major posthumous retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake At Night.

ITSOFOMO (in the shadow of forward motion) , David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill 

1991/2018, 48 min, color, sound