In the Future tells the stories of people living with HIV in Mexico who have been unable to access treatment because of government corruption and widespread theft and looting of medication. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
Dec 2021
For the 2016 Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS commissioned COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists who live with their cameras as one way to manage, reflect upon, and change how they are deeply affected by HIV/AIDS. This hour-long video program was distributed internationally to museums, art institutions, schools and AIDS organizations.
Dec 2016
Through a chorus of voices, Steed Taylor explores the difficulties of being a long-term AIDS survivor and the unexpected health problems facing many senior survivors. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
The Lie is the latest in an ongoing series of short films by Carl George drawing on found footage and materials from the artist’s archive. Offering “ruminations on ruined nations,” the film aims to expose the links between war, AIDS, capitalism, and the persistent mythologies that bind them all. Commissioned in by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Dec 2019
Viva Ruiz invites transgender AIDS activist, artist, and beloved friend Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011) to speak via never before seen Hi-8 footage filmed by Chloe's then-partner Kelly McGowan in the 1990s. The process triangulates mother (Chloe), lover (Kelly), and child (Viva) in a deliberate ritual to uplift the spirit and legacy of an ancestral teacher. Through artifacts from the moment when video first became accessible and before mobile phone cameras became ubiquitous, we witness Chloe declare herself and her sisters as leaders in art, advocacy and culture for evermore. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Voices at the Gate juxtaposes the bucolic landscapes inhabited by women’s prisons with archival and contemporary audio recordings of poems, essays, and interviews produced by women of color in the early 1990s at the intersection of incarceration and HIV & AIDS activism. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
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. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
Dec 2020
Danny Kilbride interviews Professor John Ashton, a public health official who helped institute the Mersey Model of Harm Reduction in Liverpool in 1986, the first government-funded needle exchange program in the UK. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic.
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. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino's self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino's body, evidence opens up to the list's potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and personal memories amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.
Dec 2014
Tacoma Action Collective is a partnership of Black community organizers working in grassroots action and education. This video chronicles how the collective organized in response to the whitewashing of the exhibition Art, AIDS, America at the Tacoma Art Museum. The collective also reflects on their work at the 2016 International AIDS Conference in South Africa, responding to interconnected structural violences with the demand #StopErasingBlackPeople. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
Dec 2018
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. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
For 7 Years Later, Glen Fogel visited his ex-boyfriend Nathan Lee in Providence, RI and videotaped a conversation between the two of them. They discuss the events that led to their breakup 7 years ago, while a robotic camera autonomously scans the apartment. The video is edited to look as though it is a seamless single take, a time warp in which Fogel and Lee appear in multiple places in the apartment at the same time. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and personal memories amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.
The SPOT (Safe Place Over Time) is dedicated to providing services and opportunities for wellness, empowerment, and leadership to young men in Jackson, Mississippi. 40 percent of gay and bisexual men in Jackson, the majority of them black, are living with HIV—the nation’s highest rate. Housed in the Jackson Medical Mall among healthcare and service providers, The SPOT offers a place for young men to openly discuss issues and challenges, work to improve their quality of life, and to promote the concept of self-worth in a variety of ways, including dance and creative expression. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
VOCAL-NY (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders) is a New York-based grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people in order to create healthy and just communities. VOCAL is intentional in drawing connections between homelessness and the HIV and AIDS epidemic, understanding that access to housing impacts access to medication and the ability to maintain a regimen. In this video, VOCAL explains how it uses political theater and direct action as creative tactics to address housing policies as part of their work to end the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Commissioned in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
Working with artists, curators, and art institutions on a national and international scale, Visual AIDS has never stopped commissioning and distributing projects at the intersections of art, AIDS and activism. Visual AIDS uses art to combat AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. To introduce ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, Visual AIDS reflects on its thirty years of fighting AIDS with the power of art. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2018 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS, a program of short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives that highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today.
I Remember Dancing brings together an intergenerational cast of "trans and queer gaysians" ruminating on the past and future of AIDS, activism, gay culture, love, and (un)safe sex. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember poems, these confessions illuminate perspectives of queer Asian communities often absent from whitewashed narratives of HIV and AIDS. Grief, regret, longing, risk, and pleasure surface as their memories and fantasies blur into one another. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
I'm Still Me explores how digital platforms have created community and connections for Sian, a Black woman living with HIV and navigating the stigma and misinformation that is prevalent in the American South. Through her blog, social media accounts and online video platforms, Sian connects with (predominately) heterosexual Black women that send her messages, ask questions, and share their experiences with stigma and fear, all the while creating community that may have previously only existed in the shadows. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Through an experimental collage of video and pictographs, (eye, virus) explores how conversations around disclosure, stigma, and harm reduction shift across generations and from public to private realms. Combining street interviews with footage from a punk show and a mobile testing site, the video centers pleasure and community as it expands the conversation around HIV to include hepatitis C and the opioid epidemic. (eye, virus) extends from documentation of a 2017 public program titled AIDS OS Y Version 10.11.6, and is collaboratively produced with Nikki Sweet. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
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 Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
