A Day With(out) Art Screening: “Red Reminds Me…”

60 min. loop

Experience seven short videos the arts organization Visual AIDS commissioned for Day With(out) Art 2024, a global day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis and its impact on artistic communities.

Red Reminds Me… features newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz (Philippines), Milko Delgado (Panama), Imani Harrington (USA), David Oscar Harvey (USA), Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia), Nixie (Belgium), Vasilios Papapitsios (USA).

Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations—blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. Red Reminds Me… invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, from eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media, which features photographer Taryn Simon’s Live HIV, HIV Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, allowing us to consider the lasting impact of HIV/AIDS in our community.

About the Films

Red Reminds Me… invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, from eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.

Gian Cruz, Dear Kwong Chi
In Dear Kwong Chi, Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.

Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA
Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, El Club del SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics—documentary, horror, comedy—to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.

Imani Harrington, Age of Knowing / Scraped
A professor is asked to help a young child who has been Scraped and is soon faced with a moral dilemma that either exposes the truth or upholds a lie. With a nostalgic aesthetic, Age of Knowing / Scraped traces memories of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.

David Oscar Harvey, Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck
Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.

Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, El VIH se enamoró de mi (HIV Fell in Love With Me)
HIV Fell in Love With Me tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.

Nixie, it’s giving
Through home videos, archival footage and fantasy landscapes, it’s giving explores the connection between caregiving for a child and caregiving for a dying community. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?

Vasilios Papapitsios, PARAPRONOIA
Papapitsios describes PARAPRONOIA as a “meditation on how we can(not) heal in the environments that make us sick, from the perspective of an infected neurodivergent faggot.” Combining auto-fiction with magical realism, Papapitsios humorously reimagines narratives around mental health and chronic illness.

These experiences are included with Museum admission and are free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

Sponsored by: The Milwaukee Art Museum Photography Council

Image: Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA, 2024. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Red Reminds Me…