Day With(out) Art 2020: TRANSMISSIONS
For Day With(out) Art 2020, Visual AIDS presents TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
TRANSMISSIONS does not intend to give a comprehensive account of the global epidemic, but provides a platform for a diversity of voices from beyond the United States, offering insight into the divergent and overlapping experiences of people living with HIV around the world today.
The six commissioned videos cover a broad range of subjects, such as the erasure of women living with HIV in South America, neocolonial public health campaigns in India, and the realities of stigma and disclosure for young people in Uganda.
As the world continues to adapt to living with a new virus, COVID-19, these videos offer an opportunity to reflect on the resonances and differences between the two epidemics and their uneven distribution across geography, race, and gender.
Visual AIDS Online Premiere Event
★ Monday, November 30, 6pm: Livestream screening event followed by a conversation with all six commissioned artists, moderated by Jih Fei Cheng. Presented in partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), with support from 20+ additional institutions. Please RSVP to receive updates about this event.
TRANSMISSIONS will also be screened at numerous locations around the world, both online and in-person. A growing list of screening events is available here.
Beginning December 1, the video program will be available to view online at visualaids.org/transmissions.
Commissioned Videos
Jorge Bordello, Ministry of Health
Ministry of Health employs the aesthetics of horror movies and silent film to evoke the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on four men living with HIV in the city of Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Gevi Dimitrakopoulou, This is Right: Zak, Life and After
This is Right: Zak, Life and After is a portrait of Zak Kostopoulos, a well-known queer AIDS activist who was publicly lynched to death in Athens in 2018. Zak’s chosen family and community highlight Zak’s activist life and the response that his murder has galvanized.
Las Indetectables, Me Cuido
Me Cuido (I take care of myself/I’m careful) questions the relationship between colonial paradigms of health, religious guilt, and the stigmatization of people living with HIV in the context of Chile’s capitalist and neoliberal regime.
George Stanley Nsamba, Finding Purpose
Finding Purpose reflects on the experience of producing a film about the lives of teens born with HIV in Uganda and the pervasive stigma that surrounded the project.
Lucia Egaña Rojas, Female Disappearance Syndrome
Lucia Egaña Rojas challenges gendered representations of HIV and AIDS, investigating what Lina Meruane has termed “female disappearance syndrome”—the erasure of women living with HIV from conversations about the epidemic.
Charan Singh, They Called it Love, But Was it Love?
They Called it Love, But Was it Love? depicts scenes from the lives of kothis living in India. Reduced to a “risk group” by public health campaigns and misunderstood through Western notions of gender and sexuality, these protagonists have real lives and inhabit unique worlds with their own quests for fulfillment and love.
Call for Participation
Visual AIDS is partnering with museums, galleries, universities, and organizations around the world to observe Day With(out) Art by presenting TRANSMISSIONS on/around December 1, World AIDS Day. If you are interested in participating, please email Blake Paskal, Programs Associate, at bpaskal@visualaids.org.
