David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

For his exhibition at the East Village gallery Civilian Warfare in May 1984, Wojnarowicz created a group of cast-plaster heads that he individualized by applying torn maps and paint. He made twenty-three of them, a reference to the number of chromosome pairs in human DNA, and explained that the series was about “the evolution of consciousness.” At the gallery, he installed these “alien heads” on long shelves on a wall painted with a bull’s-eye. Suggesting a ring line, the installation evoked the conflicts then ravaging Central and South America, from the Contra War in Nicaragua to the Salvadoran Civil War to the Argentine Dirty War. The specter of torture, disappearance, and human-rights abuses cast a shadow over all of the Americas. 

Wojnarowicz’s work, with its dense constellation of signs and symbols, frequently used allegory to critique what he saw as our corrupt society. The alien head, for example, was a way to represent the foreigner or the outsider. These symbols of the powerless hold space and compel their viewers to consider how power is claimed and held.