StoreEveryone I Know Is Sick
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Day With(out) Art 2023: Everyone I Know Is Sick
Visual AIDS announces a program of six videos generating connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability. Inspired by a statement from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in the book Black Futures, Everyone I Know Is Sick examines how our society excludes disabled and sick people by upholding a false dichotomy of health and sickness. Inviting us to understand disability as a common experience rather than an exception to the norm, the program highlights a range of experiences spanning HIV, COVID, mental health, and aging. The commissioned artists foreground the knowledge and expertise of disabled and sick people in a world still grappling with multiple ongoing pandemics.
Everyone I Know Is Sick will feature newly commissioned short videos by artists working across the world: Dorothy Cheung (Hong Kong), Hiura Fernandes & Lili Nascimento (Brazil), Beau Gomez (Canada/Philippines), Dolissa Medina & Ananias P. Soria (USA), Vasilios Papapitsios (USA), and Kurt Weston (USA).
The artists in this year’s program were selected through an open call process juried by writer Kimberly Drew and artists Marguerite Van Cook, Charan Singh, and Pato Hebert.
The hour-long video program will premiere on December 1, 2023, World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art. Visual AIDS partners with over 150 museums, galleries, universities, and organizations around the world to present free screenings on/around December 1.
If you are interested in screening this year’s Day With(out) Art video program, please visit this page for more information.
Commissioned Videos
Dorothy Cheung, Heart Murmur
Heart Murmur invites people living with HIV in Hong Kong to reflect on their experience of the COVID pandemic, juxtaposing their voices with the urban landscape.
Hiura Fernandes and Lili Nascimento, Aquela criança com AID$ (That Child with AID$)
That Child with AID$ tells the story of Brazilian advocate and artist Lili Nascimento, who was born with HIV in 1990. Lili has worked to expand narratives about living with HIV beyond the limited images and ideologies that permeate the AIDS industry.
Beau Gomez, This Bed I Made
This Bed I Made presents the bed as a place of solace and agency beyond just a site of illness or isolation. Through the shared stories of individuals living with HIV in the Philippines, the video explores modes of care, restoration, and abundance in the midst of pandemic pervasion.
Dolissa Medina and Ananias P. Soria, Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout)
Ananias, a San Francisco Bay Area artist and immigrant, performs the folkloric Danza de los Viejitos (the Dance of the Old Men). Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, where the dance originates, Ananias interprets its movements through the lens of his spirituality, his long-term HIV-related disabilities, and his search for a place in the world.
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.
Kurt Weston, Losing the Light
Losing the Light reflects the artist’s bitter battle to stay in this world as a long-term survivor of AIDS who has lost his vision to CMV retinitis. An experimental self-portrait, the video evokes the dissolution and fragmentation of the artist's body, representing the impact of blindness, long-term HIV infection, and the cumulative effects of decades of antiretroviral medication.
Dorothy Cheung (she/her) is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through dual perspectives: the personal and the political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works have been exhibited internationally at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), EYE Filmmuseum, and Korzo Theater, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.
Hiura Fernandes (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and product designer living in João Pessoa, Brazil. Her audiovisual and performance work seeks to unite the body with cinematographic practices. Her work considers original forms of communication through the body and ancestrality as pathways to healing and embodied living. As a Black travesti, she experiences in her body and in her art the stereotypes of counter-hegemonic experiences. She seeks to understand the expressions of the body as a power capable of generating love, fear, anguish, and hate.
Beau Gomez (he/him) is a visual artist based in Montreal and Toronto whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges, and conversations around cross-cultural narratives, as they relate to positions of queerness and community. His work is anchored by image-making and storytelling as conduits between one person’s experiences and another’s, giving permission to shared means of reckoning, reconditioning, and nurturing. Recent exhibitions include Artspace Gallery (Toronto), VU Photo (Quebec City), La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2019, Beau launched Fixer, a community gathering of image makers, writers and creatives in Toronto that engage in discussion and critique of recent works in progress.
Dolissa Medina (she/her) and Ananias P. Soria (he/him) are the current incarnation of Grito Viejito, an artist collective devoted to queer world-mending through the adaptation of the Mexican folkloric “Danza de los Viejitos” (Dance of the Old Men). Medina, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas, founded the research-creation project, which uses the Viejito figure as a vessel to hold dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. In the project’s first iteration, Medina partners with Soria, a multidisciplinary artist interested in transformative energetic expression through movement, music, and dance.
Lili Nascimento (they/them) is a transpersonal psychologist, columnist, and artist who studies and works with children living with HIV and AIDS in Brazil. They work at the intersection of art and the clinic, provoking poetic and political possibilities for existence.
Vasilios Papapitsios (they/he) is a Los Angeles-based writer, filmmaker, and artist originally from the Southern U.S. whose work transmutes stigma and trauma with a flare for the fantastical. Vasilios has contributed to projects for MasterClass, AwesomenessTV, and Emmy-nominated intersectional media platform OTV - Open Television. They were recognized as a Notable Writer in the 2021 Outfest screenwriting lab and as an artivist storyteller in residence with UCLA’s Through Positive Eyes project. Vasilios creates strange, frank, and whimsical worlds for us to wander off in, blending genres and blurring boundaries within advocacy, education, and entertainment.
Kurt Weston (he/him) is an artist working primarily with photography. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and became legally blind in 1996 due to a related condition, Cytomegalovirus retinitis. For a time he was easily identified as having AIDS due to purplish red lesions—Kaposi’s sarcoma—all over his face and body. His artwork reflects on this experience of visibility and disability, examining cultural stigmas surrounding HIV and AIDS, the disabled body, mortality, and loss. Weston’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the National AIDS Museum and have been featured in exhibitions at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (Washington, DC), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), among others.
