Sunday Showcase

World AIDS Day
Visual AIDS: Red Reminds Me . . .

Various Artists

Sunday, December 1, 12:30 pm

Free

For Day With(out) Art 2024, Visual AIDS is working with the Speed to present Red Reminds Me. . ., a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. 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.

The title is drawn from the words of Stacy Jennings, an activist, poet, and long-term survivor with HIV, who writes: “Red reminds me, red reminds me, red reminds me…to be free.” Linking “red” to freedom, Jennings flips the usual connotations of the color and offers a new way of thinking about the complexity of living with HIV. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, Red Reminds Me… expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deep, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.

The program features new work by Gian Cruz, Milko Delgado, Imani Harrington, David Oscar Harvey, Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, Nixie, and Vasilios Papapitsios.

Since 1989, Visual AIDS has mobilized art institutions for Day With(out) Art, a day of mourning and action that uses art to respond to the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis. Every year, Visual AIDS creates and distributes videos by artists and activists to over 150 universities, museums, art institutions, and AIDS organizations to mark World AIDS Day. 2024, U.S./Philippines/Panama/Argentina/Colombia/Belgium, DCP, 60 minutes. Recommended for 16+.