DNCB – A History of Irritation

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)