Yun Liao & Luke Cheng
Acrylic glass, pins, one month's supply of Truvada
London & NYC
Truvada Case was first made as a personal appliance – a receptacle as a visual calendar to track one’s daily intake. It appropriates Damien Hirst’s usage of pills as art objects but takes it a step further by displaying real drugs. Truvada, a combination of two anti-retroviral drugs that were previously approved for HIV treatment, gained FDA approval in 2004 as a prophylaxis for HIV; by taking the pill daily, scientists estimated a patient would be 99% protected from contracting HIV.
It seems curious to us that the dominant narrative around the dangers of straight physical intimacy is the unplanned creation of life, whereas for gay men it's the unplanned extinguishing of life.
The simple, minimalist display of the monthly dosage of the drug in a matrix-format lays bare the daily rituals of our sexual lives, but all sense of emotions is markedly absent.