About the Event
HIV has long been associated with the red ribbon and the connotations of its color—blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. On World AIDS Day, the MCA is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2024 in presenting Red Reminds Me . . .. Comprising seven videos that center the experience of living with HIV today, this program invites viewers to consider a complex understanding of images and feelings surrounding HIV.
Red Reminds Me . . . features newly commissioned short 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). The featured artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.
Visual AIDS is a New York–based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.
Video Synopses
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.
Funding
Lead support for the 2024–25 season of MCA Performance and Public Programs is provided by Elizabeth A. Liebman.
The MCA is a proud member of the Museums in the Park and receives major support from the Chicago Park District.