Day With(out) Art: Red Reminds Me...

Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS have 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 deep, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings. (90 mins., DCP)

Red Reminds Me… features newly commissioned short videos by artists working across the world:
Gian Cruz (Philippines) 
Milko Delgado (Panama) 
Imani Harrington (United States) 
David Oscar Harvey (United States)
Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia) 
Nixie (Belgium) 
Vasilios Papapitsios (United States) 

The artists in this year’s program were selected through an open call process juried by artists/activists aAliy A. Muhammad and Jessica Whitbread, curator Alper Turan, and community organizer Josué Lopez.

IMAGE CAPTION
Clockwise from top left: Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck, Dear Kwong Chi, PARAPRONOIA, it’s giving, El Club del SIDA, El VIH se enamoró de mi (HIV Fell in Love With Me), courtesy of Visual AIDS for Red Reminds Me....