For the 2016 Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS presents COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists who live with their cameras as one way to manage, reflect upon, and change how they are deeply affected by HIV/AIDS. This hour-long video program will be distributed internationally to museums, art institutions, schools and AIDS organizations.
A collaborative video project made with women living in Taiwan who use their cameras to process stress and stigma, and to share their experiences living with HIV. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino's self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino's body, evidence opens up to the list's potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and memories from their personal perspective amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.
Viva Ruiz invites transgender AIDS activist, artist, and beloved friend Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011) to speak via never before seen Hi-8 footage filmed by Chloe's then-partner Kelly McGowan in the 1990s. The process triangulates mother (Chloe), lover (Kelly), and child (Viva) in a deliberate ritual to uplift the spirit and legacy of an ancestral teacher. Through artifacts from the moment when video first became accessible and before mobile phone cameras became ubiquitous, we witness Chloe declare herself and her sisters as leaders in art, advocacy and culture for evermore. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The Sero Project is a U.S.-based network of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and allies fighting for freedom from stigma and injustice. Sero is particularly focused on ending the inappropriate use of one's HIV status in criminal prosecutions of PLHIV, including for non-disclosure, potential or perceived HIV exposure or HIV transmission. The 2018 conference, co-produced with Positive Women’s Network-USA, included a showcase of visual art and poetry made by advocates working against HIV criminalization. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
Through a chorus of voices, Steed Taylor explores the difficulties of being a long-term AIDS survivor and the unexpected health problems facing many senior survivors. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
Lucía Egaña Rojas challenges gendered representations of HIV and AIDS, investigating what Lina Meruane has termed “female disappearance syndrome”—the erasure of women living with HIV from conversations about the epidemic. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
Ministry of Health employs the aesthetics of horror movies and silent film to evoke the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on four men living with HIV in the city of Tlaxcala, Mexico Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
They Called it Love, But Was it Love? depicts scenes from the lives of kothis living in India. Reduced to a “risk group” by public health campaigns and misunderstood through Western notions of gender and sexuality, these protagonists have real lives and inhabit unique worlds with their own quests for fulfilment and love. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
Much handled things are always soft unearths the unwritten and undocumented histories of public sex culture in the south-side of Chicago. Through conversation with longterm survivor Patric McCoy, the film traces the height of activity in the 1970s, the downfall of cruising culture in the 1980s, and the prevailing summer heat, which continues to linger. Together, McCoy and Woods-Morrow reflect on their relationship to cruising, to photography, and to each other; attempting to bridge the gap between what was, and what still remains to be explored. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Two fragmented interviews with artists living with HIV in Puerto Rico mediate an audiovisual invocation of the late Boricua poet Manuel Ramos Otero who passed away from complications of the virus in 1990. Guerra sets out to translate work Manuel deemed untranslatable, investigating the ongoing passions that informed his work. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
Voices at the Gate juxtaposes the bucolic landscapes inhabited by women’s prisons with archival and contemporary audio recordings of poems, essays, and interviews produced by women of color in the early 1990s at the intersection of incarceration and HIV & AIDS activism. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
This is Right: Zak, Life and After is a portrait of Zak Kostopoulos, a well-known queer AIDS activist who was publicly lynched to death in Athens in 2018. Zak's chosen family and community highlight Zak's activist life and the response that his murder has galvanized. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
The Lie is the latest in an ongoing series of short films by Carl George drawing on found footage and materials from the artist’s archive. Offering “ruminations on ruined nations,” the film aims to expose the links between war, AIDS, capitalism, and the persistent mythologies that bind them all. Commissioned in by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
A chronicle of Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad’s 2017 medication strike against the Mazzoni Center, a LGBT health clinic in Philadelphia, and the direct action campaign by the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative that preceded it Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
Finding Purpose reflects on the experience of producing a film about the lives of teens born with HIV in Uganda and the pervasive stigma that surrounded the project. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
Danny Kilbride interviews Professor John Ashton, a public health official who helped institute the Mersey Model of Harm Reduction in Liverpool in 1986, the first government-funded needle exchange program in the UK. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
In the Future tells the stories of people living with HIV in Mexico who have been unable to access treatment because of government corruption and widespread theft and looting of medication. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
Working with artists, curators, and art institutions on a national and international scale, Visual AIDS has never stopped commissioning and distributing projects at the intersections of art, AIDS and activism. Visual AIDS uses art to combat AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. To introduce ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, Visual AIDS reflects on its thirty years of fighting AIDS with the power of art. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
Me Cuido (I take care of myself/I’m careful) questions the relationship between colonial paradigms of health, religious guilt, and the stigmatization of people living with HIV in the context of Chile’s capitalist and neoliberal regime. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
