For Day With(out) Art 2022, Visual AIDS presents Being and Belonging, a program of seven short videos highlighting under-told stories of HIV and AIDS from the perspective of artists living with HIV across the world.
The program features newly commissioned work by Camila Arce (Argentina), Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes (USA), Jaewon Kim (South Korea), Clifford Prince King (USA), Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta Huntertexas (Colombia), Mikiki (Canada), and Jhoel Zempoalteca and La Jerry(México).
The New York City premiere at The Whitney Museum of American Art will include a post-screening discussion with artists Jaewon Kim and Mikiki, moderated by Visual AIDS Programs Director Kyle Croft.
From navigating sex and intimacy to confronting stigma and isolation, Being & Belonging centers the emotional realities of living with HIV today. How does living with HIV shift the ways that a person experiences, asks for, or provides love, support, and belonging? The seven videos are a call for belonging from those that have been stigmatized within their communities or left out of mainstream HIV/AIDS narratives.
Los Angeles Hybrid Premiere
MOCA LA + The Studio Museum in Harlem
Sat December 3, 4PM PT / 7PM ET
There will be an in-person screening of Being & Belonging at MOCA LA, followed by a conversation with Clifford Prince King and Davina “Dee” Conner, moderated by Blake Paskal. The screening and conversation will also be livestreamed.
100+ More Screenings Worldwide!
On and around December 1, World AIDS Day, Being & Belonging will screen for free at 100+ art museums, universities, AIDS organizations, and other art institutions worldwide. To find a screening near you, visit the growing list of screenings on our website here.
Beginning on December 1, to mark Day With(out) Art/World AIDS Day, a day of action and mourning in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis, MoMA and Visual AIDS are pleased to present a program of titles drawn from the annual Visual AIDS video commission program. Each year Visual AIDS—a nonprofit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving their legacies—commissions artists to create new videos that respond to the crisis.
The program will screen in-person at MoMA on December 1 at 6:30pm, and will be available to stream through MoMA’s Virtual Cinema from December 1–15.
The program includes a selection of works made since 2014 that chronicle the public and private lives of sexually active queer people, beginning with a pair of meditations on cruising: Derrick Woods-Morrow’s sweaty intergenerational conversation with Patric McCoy Much handled things are always soft and The Labyrinth 1.0, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s filmic adaptation of Brad Johnson’s poem “The Labyrinth,” from the 1995 anthology Milking Black Bull. The conversation then turns to sex and education, first in DiAna’s Hair Ego REMIX, Cheryl Dunye’s 30-year update on DiAna DiAna, the American hairdresser and AIDS activist who was the protagonist of Ellen Spiro’s landmark documentary DiAna’s Hair Ego, followed by Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo), an urban ghost story in which a chatty tub-dweller dishes about the lovers who haunt him. The program concludes with two portraits of crucial, underrepresented figures in AIDS activism: Rhys Ernst’s Dear Lou Sullivan, a tender epistle to trans author and activist Lou Sullivan; and Shanti Avirgan’s Beat Goes On, a valiant ode to Keith Cylar, founder of the New York–based homeless-advocacy group Housing Works.
100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo) by Brontez Purnell for Day With(out) Art 2017
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. visualaids.org
