Viral Interventions

Visual AIDS presents the US premiere of Viral Interventions, a program of six new artist videos produced in Toronto. The program features work by Zachery Longboy, Lesley Chan, Samuel Lopez & Christian Hui, Mikiki, Andrew Zealley, and Esery Mondesir.

Viral Interventions

Wednesday, June 22, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives

Please RSVP for this free screening

In 1991, a loose network of Toronto artists, grassroots activists and community groups collaborated on an innovative public access cable series entitled Toronto Living with AIDS—and were eventually shut down because of "too much thigh stroking." These half-hour, no-budget tapes were some of the first in Canada to give voice to communities living with AIDS: fighting the government, fighting big pharma, fighting for our lives.

Thirty years later, in the grip of our new pandemic, Viral Interventions continues this work with a new generation of Toronto artists and activists. Viral Interventions is a three-year York University research project and residency (funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), with cohorts of artists and activists coming together every month to workshop stories, trade ideas and create new urgent videos about living with HIV today.

Intimate, passionate, irreverent, angry, experimental, unabashedly beautiful, radically inventive, brimming with loss and joy — these new works by Longboy, Chan, Mikiki, Lopez/Hui, Zealley and Mondesir plunge us inside six extraordinary stories, exploring HIV realities — in our worlds and in our bodies.

This screening is part of BROADCAST, a free summer screening series featuring contemporary artists’ responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis through the medium of video. BROADCAST features six unique screenings from June 8–July 9 at venues across New York City. Full details are available at visualaids.org/broadcast.