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One day this kid....

Poster
1990 (made)
Artist/Maker
AIDS-Hilfe (producers)
ACT UP (producers)
Wojnarowicz (artist)
Place of origin
Germany (printed)

Offset lithograph poster reproducing 'Untitled (One day this kid....)', by David Wojnarowicz, 1990 (originally published in the same year as a Photostat) with the English text of the original translated into German. The poster depicts a photograph of Wojnarowicz as a child surrounded by a text detailing the homophobic abuse he might face in his future for being gay.

Object details

Categories
Gender and Sexuality
LGBTQ
Object type
Poster
TitleOne day this kid.... (assigned by artist)
Materials and techniques
Offset lithograph poster
Brief description
AIDS Awareness poster produced by Deutsche AIDS Hilfe using 'Untitled (One day this kid....)', by David Wojnarowicz. Germany, 1990.
Physical description
Offset lithograph poster reproducing 'Untitled (One day this kid....)', by David Wojnarowicz, 1990 (originally published in the same year as a Photostat) with the English text of the original translated into German. The poster depicts a photograph of Wojnarowicz as a child surrounded by a text detailing the homophobic abuse he might face in his future for being gay.
Dimensions
  • Height: 59.5cm
  • Width: 83.7cm
Marks and inscriptions
Translation
“One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compell [sic] him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.”
Credit line
Given by Deutsche AIDS Hilfe
Object history
AIDS-Hilfe worked in collaboration with ACT UP, who had created an English language version of this poster first. It was reproduced under the title 'Eines Tages...' with German text in the same year of the original art works by Wojnarowicz. The original works were a series of 10 Photostat prints which Wojnarowicz created with Jean Foos.
Subjects depicted
Safe Sex
AIDS
Gay
Homophobia
Collection
Prints, Drawings & Paintings Collection
Accession number
E.1013-1996

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Record createdApril 20, 2009
Record URL
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O227268/one-day-this-kid-poster-wojnarowicz/
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