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, around the history of the chemical substance DNCB, used both in film and photo labs to process color, and as a treatment in alternative AIDS clinics.
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)
Oliver Husain (born 1969 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is a filmmaker and artist with a particular interest in theatrical and film concepts of the nature of the audience and enactment.
Addressing a dialogue between images and objecthood, Oliver Husain's projects often begin with a portrait of a person or place. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual codes—such as dance, puppetry, and animation—to disassemble and subvert fixed readings of the original material. Translated into cinema and gallery spaces, his installations, performances and film projects set up narratives that charm or fold the viewers into questioning their role as a spectator or subject.
Kerstin Schroedinger (born 1978 in Trier, Germany) works in film and video, and sound and performance. Her historiographical practice questions the means of image production, historical continuities, and ideological depictions of representation.
