STILL BEGINNING: MOCA LA Screening and Discussion

STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art

For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS partnered with MOCA LA to present STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.

The seven short videos ranged in subject from anti-stigma work in New Orleans to public sex culture in Chicago, highlighting pioneering AIDS activism and staging intergenerational conversations. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,”* the video program resisted narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades.

Click here to watch STILL BEGINNING. Click below to listen to the post-screening discussion with artists Nguyen Tan Hoang and Iman Shervington, moderated by Pato Hebert, an educator, artist, and HIV worker.

For more information about STILL BEGINNING and the history of Day With(out) Art, see here.

*Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is Still Beginning (2019) was recently exhibited as part of "I Wanna Be Well," a retrospective curated by Stephanie Snyder for the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College and the Art Institute of Chicago. Hear Bordowitz discuss the work here.

Participant Biographies

Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. His work explores the aesthetics, ethics and poetics of interconnectedness. He is particularly interested in space, spirituality, place, pedagogy and progressive praxis. His projects have been presented at Beton7 in Athens, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Quito, the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale, and IHLIA LGBT Heritage in Amsterdam. Hebert has worked in HIV prevention initiatives with queer communities of color since 1994. He continues these grassroots efforts at local and transnational levels, working with social movements and community organizations to develop innovative approaches to HIV mobilization, programs, advocacy and justice. He curated exhibitions and led creative initiatives at the International AIDS Conferences in Vienna (2010), Melbourne (2014), Durban (2016) and Amsterdam (2018). He also teaches as an Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where his students have twice nominated him for the David Payne-Carter Award for Teaching Excellence.

Nguyen Tan Hoang is a videomaker and film and media scholar. His short experimental videos include K.I.P, Forever Bottom!, PIRATED! and look_im_azn. He is the author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke UP, 2014) and articles on porn pedagogy and Southeast Asian queer cinema. He teaches literature, film, and cultural studies at UC San Diego.

Iman Shervington is the Director of Media & Communications at the Institute of Women & Ethnic Studies (IWES), a public health non-profit. Through IWES, Iman has utilized her script development, cinematography, directing, producing, and editing skills to create over 50 short films and PSAs, a web-series, a feature-length documentary, two feature-length narrative films and an award-winning podcast. In 2016, Iman was chosen as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leader to promote a culture of health in New Orleans and she received the award as a "Changemaker" in the New Orleans-based Millennial Awards. Outside of film, Iman specializes in social marketing, social media management, graphic design, photography, positive youth development, participatory action research, and media literacy.