LA Premiere: Red Reminds Me...

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

LA premiere followed by a conversation with conversation with Vasilios Papapitsios and Jih-Fei Cheng. Sponsored by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Visual AIDS is proud to partner with the LA LGBT Center for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me..., a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today.

The program features newly commissioned work 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), and Vasilios Papapitsios (USA).

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.

Post screening conversation with Vasilios Papapitsios and Jih-Fei Cheng, moderated by Blake Paskal.

*The title Red Reminds Me... 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. Jennings recites this poem in the video Here We Are: Voices of Black Women Who Live with HIV, created by Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes for Day With(out) Art 2022: Being and Belonging.

Visual AIDS Day With(out) Art programming is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.