Oh, Lovely Appearance of death 

2020-ongoing

Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death is a video project that reanimates Jeremy Wade’s artistic archive through a hallucinatory exploration of ecstasy, excess, untenable loss, depression, exhaustion, and the “zombie subjectivity” produced by neoliberal self-management. Developed with Darcey Bennett, Zander Porter, and editor Ethan Folk for HAU4, the work is hosted by a retinue of Wade’s threshold-keeping archetypes: the Dead Clown from Death Asshole Rave Video (2015), the Battlefield Nurse from The Future Clinic for Critical Care, and Puddles the Pelican. Together these figures embrace death as a speculative, irreverent, queer strategy to undo capitalist reproduction and unpack an urgent ethics of care.

Drawing on gospel traditions and queer theory’s embrace of “difficult hope” (Muñoz), the project reframes death as a generative life-hack and political strategy: a way to resist capture by oppressive norms while catalyzing imagination, solidarity, courage through dangerous laughter. In Wade’s words, this is not goth, but “a lovely death, a queer death, a death far beyond value”—a poetic and excessive act of non-participation that transforms mourning into a force for collective survival.