An Infected Sunset

Demian DinéYazhi’ (b. 1983, Gallup, United States; based in Portland, United States)
"An Infected Sunset" 2018
Digital video (4:50 min)
Collection of the artist

Demian DinéYazhi ́’s An Infected Sunset consists of excerpts from the artist’s poem of the same name, layered over moving images of alternating bodies of sand and water. This source poem, conceived on the heels of the tragic massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, the threat of pipelines on sacred site at Standing Rock (#NoDAPL), and state-sanctioned
executions of Black men, speaks truthfully to the uninhibited and intertwined horrors of the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, settler colonial state. In the video, DinéYazhi ́ speaks back at these violent legacies and the racist present to offer an invocation to queer intimacy, Indigenous knowledge-making and remembering, and shared resistance. More than an artist, DinéYazhi ́ is a truth teller.

Born to the clans of Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water) in New Mexico, DinéYazhi ́ is an artist, poet, curator, and founder of RISE: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. Their transdisciplinary practice spans poetry, performance, publication, and visual art making visible and legible the historical, unresolved, and continuing violence of colonization—as well as its current
heteropatriarchal manifestations—for Indigenous and marginalized peoples, centering Indigenous knowledge and cosmology towards liberation and survivance.

By PJ Gubatina Policarpio (based in San Francisco, United States)