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Continuing the LGBTQ AANHPI Program Series, the Museum of Chinese in America is proud to partner 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. An artist conversation with Gian Cruz will take place after the screening.

Red Reminds Me… will feature 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.

*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.

Video Synopses

Gian Cruz, Dear Kwong Chi

In Dear Kwong Chi, Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.

Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA

Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, El Club del SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics—documentary, horror, comedy—to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.

Imani Maryahm Harrington, Realms Remix

Through a collage of poetry and archival images, Realms Remix traces memories and sensations of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.

David Oscar Harvey, Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck

Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.

Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, El VIH se enamoró de mi (HIV Fell in Love With Me)

HIV Fell in Love With Me tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.

Nixie, it’s giving

Through home videos, archival footage and textile landscapes, it’s giving explores various forms of family across time. The artist’s domestic life is paired with archival video of queer and trans chosen families mirroring small acts of joy, resistance, and sustenance. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?

Vasilios Papapitsios, LUCID NIGHTMARE

Papapitsios describes LUCID NIGHTMARE 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.

Artist Biographies

Gian Cruz (he/him) is a Filipino artist, researcher, and arts worker. His artistic practice is rooted in photography, art theory, and criticism and intersects with cinema, performance, and HIV/AIDS activism within Southeast Asian frameworks. He has worked with the National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art, Korea; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Picto Foundation, Paris; Palais Galliera, Paris; Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris; La Biennale di Venezia; the Japan Foundation; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Bienal de Curitiba; Blackwood Gallery, Toronto; Pride Photo Award, Amsterdam; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Juan De La Mar (they/them) is a lawyer, HIV+ activist, and artist from Colombia. Their documentary debut, De Gris a POSITHIVO, has won 16 awards and screened at 52 festivals worldwide. They have performed at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) and were selected as the 2024 HIV Culture Residency at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito. As an activist, they have worked with the Latin American HIV-Positive Youth Network (J+LAC) and they currently coordinate Bogota’s Fast-Track Cities strategy to accelerate the response to HIV/AIDS.

Milko Delgado (he/him) is a transdisciplinary artist whose cultural practice integrates various forms of research and knowledge production, primarily within the realms of visual arts, video, performance, pedagogy, and cultural management. Delgado’s work explores the intersections between the boy and nature, opening dialogue about identity, coloniality, extraction, health, and land. Delgado graduated from the International School of Film and Television – EICTV in Cuba. His work has been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, Teorética (Costa Rica)/Fresh Milk (Barbados), New York Latin American Art Triennial, and the Center for Visual Arts (Denver).

Imani Maryahm Harrington (she/her) is a writer, author and conceptual artist who has documented on the conditions of women since the age of 25. She was an editor for the anthology Positive/Negative: Women of Color and HIV/AIDS: A Collection of Plays (2002) and her play Love & Danger (1995) was among the first to address women and HIV. Her other titles include The Communal Plays and Other Narratives, On Writing I, ISSHOWAT, and House of Leaven.

David Oscar Harvey (he/him) is a psychotherapist and psychoanalysist-in-training, living in Philadelphia. His essay film on HIV criminalization, RED RED RED, has screened at film festivals and art spaces internationally. His writing on identity, HIV/AIDS and film and media have appeared in numerous publications. Harvey is an active member in the artist and activist collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?.

Mariana Iacono (she/her) is a social worker, media activist, and educator who works with networks of people living with HIV in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean for more than 10 years. She is a co-founder of several HIV organizations in Argentina including Argentine Network of Positive Youth and Adolescents (RAJAP), RAP+30, and Latin American HIV-Positive Youth Network (J+LAC). She currently manages promotion and communication strategy for J+LAC, focusing on feminist issues and building a coalition of young people towards Cairo+20. Iacono’s writing has been published in Volcánicas, Midia Ninja, Vice, Anfibia, Tiempo Argentino, Hoja Blanca, and Revista Nómada.

nixie (she/they) is a transfemme HIV+ multimedia artist, writer, and parent, based in Belgium. Her artwork has addressed HIV and genealogy, consent in gay spaces, the joy of parenthood, mourning, and the celebration of loss. She works mainly through mediums of text, video, performance, textile and painting.

Vasilios Papapitsios (they/he) is an LA-based writer, filmmaker and artist originally from the South 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. Vasilios creates very strange, frank, and whimsical worlds for us to wander off in, blending genres and blurring boundaries within advocacy, education, and entertainment.