'I have always felt that art can change the world, and I make art to prove it.'

Interview: Gregg Bordowitz discusses his exhibition at The Brick, Los Angeles, the challenges of survivor's guilt and how art can build communities around shared experiences Interview by Jeremy Lybarger

- Jeremy Lybarger

JEREMY LYBARGER What should people expect to see at The Brick?

GREGG BORDOWITZ 'This Is Not a Love Song' is centred around the third instalment of a film trilogy that I started making in the early 1990s. The first two were Fast Trip, Long Drop [1993] and Habit [2001]. The last film, Before and After (Still in Progress) [2023], is a kind of anthology of performance works I made that directly relate to the two earlier films. Fast Trip, Long Drop was an experimental documentary about me a Jewish, queer man living with HIV at the height of the AIDS epidemic-which also featured lots of fictional elements and employed many strategies found in poetry; it has a very collage aesthetic. It was almost a decade before I made the sequel, Habit, and, although I always wanted to make a third film, it took me even longer to arrive at Before and After.

Before and After was hard to make, but it wasn't the hardest. I was very, very sick in 1993 and Fast Trip, Long Drop was really about that period where my friends were dying and I didn't really know my own future.

Habit was filmed after protease inhibitors - a new set of medications that helped stop the virus from replicating-were approved for use in the US in 1996. I was fortunate enough to be able to get access, unlike some of my friends who did not make it. But, for some of us, it saved our lives. Habit developed from my concern about the unequal distribution of these drugs around the world, which is what took me to Durban, South Africa in 2000, for the 13th International AIDS Conference. So, Habit was about me and my friends encountering South African activists, such as the filmmaker Zackie Achmat, who were leading the fight for gaining access to high-quality drugs at a cheaper price.