Holding Patterns by Alexandra Juhasz

ONE Archives, Oct 3 - Dec 20, 2025

How is research and study a critical component of AIDS activism? How do we learn, remember, and grieve differently on paper, screens, fabrics, and video? How do computers and magazines, sweaters and scarves, videotapes and queer bars hold ghosts?

How do we let them go?

The Holding Patterns installation considers how Zoom and other pandemic technologies, composite onto screens, and also into rooms, flattening and deepening attention, connection, and care. A meditation on technologies of memory, with close attention paid to medium specificity, the installation comprises four hour-long interviews and their paper transcripts—remarkable conversations between friends and “AIDS workers”—two death-bed/legacy videos shot by Alexandra Juhasz on her friends’ request (in the 1990s and 2020s), as well as some of the things and photos shared in the process of remembering, celebrating, and fighting inside queer communities of care.

Audience members are invited to interact with the installation including viewing the legacy videos of Jim Lamb, a gay white male downtown performer who died painfully before there were meds at 29 in 1993 and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022 on her own terms, in her sixties, and due largely to inequities in the American healthcare system and COVID in addition to their cherished effects.