Day With(out) Art 2024: Red Reminds Me...

For Day With(out) Art 2024, Visual AIDS presents 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.

Click here to watch the videos.

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.

Red Reminds Me… features short videos by:

Gian Cruz (Philippines)
Milko Delgado (Panama)
Imani Maryahm Harrington (USA)
David Oscar Harvey (USA)
Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia)
Nixie (Belgium)
Vasilios Papapitsios (USA)