Day With(out) Art 2024: Red Reminds Me…
Victoria Arts Council is proud to partner, once again, with Visual AIDS 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.
Red Reminds Me… features newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz (Philippines), Milko Delgado (Panama), Imani Maryahm Harrington (USA), David Oscar Harvey (USA), Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia), Nixie (Belgium), 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.
The title 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. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, Red Reminds Me…, expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deeper, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. Victoria Arts Council has been one of over 100 partners globally, working with Visual AIDS to present their Day With(Out) Art screening series since 2019.
*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 has provided a comprehensive resource guide that offers more information on each of the commissioned artworks. Click here to access the guide.