CALLING ALL DIVAS is a reading and screening event organized by artist Tyler Matthew Oyer

Perhaps an impossible dialogue is always already queer?

The reading presents poetic reflections on and conversations with queer, femme, HIV+, radical, living and dead icons felt by the artist. These poems are written to Kembra Pfahler, Ron Athey, James Baldwin, Paul Thek, Grace Jones + Keith Haring, Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, David Wojnarowicz, Nina Simone, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Federico Garcia Lorca, Reza Abdoh + Diamanda Galas. The poems dance with themes of legacy, inheritance, loss, fandom, idol worship, archiving and tenderness. 

The screening encompasses works that broaden the methods of these imaginings across artistic practices that engage “impossible” queer dialogues and imaginings.  The video program includes works by Aykan Safoglu, Every Ocean Hughes, Martin Jacob Nielsen, Ming Wong, Harold Offeh, Conrad Ventur, Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, and Tyler Matthew Oyer. 

CALLING ALL DIVAS is a manifesto-style project began in 2014 and includes live performances, videos, writing, and organizing around notions of imitation, idol worship, conjuring and inheritance located in the spirit of queer. 

Called an "interdisciplinary gospel immortalist" by Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Tyler Matthew Oyer is an artist, writer, organizer, and educator based in Los Angeles. By researching diverse modalities of activism (ACT UP, queer theatre, Brechtian theatre, surrealism, underground cabaret, and punk) his performance works generate an intergenerational dialogue around politics, seeking new ways of articulating the connection between various systems of oppression from the past to the present in an attempt to grapple with our collective political future.

This event is part of the residency 'Carrying Histories' which looks at the responsibility and burden of working with historical subject matter, with the aim of building cross-cultural awareness of past and present power structures. The residency is developed with Nairobi based artist Syowia Kyambi in collaboration with Oslo Kunstforening (OK). PRAKSIS and OK would like to thank the Goethe-Institut Norwegen, Oslo kommune and Kulturrådet for their support of the residency and its events. Further information on the residency is available here.