The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
Schwules Museum is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art by presenting STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. The screening will be followed by a discussion with scholar João Florêncio (University of Exeter) and Ben Miller (Schwules Museum).
The seven short videos range in subject from anti-stigma work in New Orleans to public sex culture in Chicago, highlighting pioneering AIDS activism and staging intergenerational conversations. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,”* the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades.
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. In 1989, Visual AIDS organized the first Day Without Art, a call to the art world for mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis. For Day With(out) Art’s thirtieth year, over 100 institutions worldwide will screen STILL BEGINNING, recognizing the important and necessary work of artists, activists, and cultural workers who have responded to AIDS while emphasizing the persistent presence of the epidemic.
Dr. João Florêncio is Senior Lecturer in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. His interdisciplinary teaching and research navigates the intersections of modern and contemporary visual culture and performance with queer theory, philosophy, medical humanities, and the post humanities with a focus on sexuality, embodiment, ecology, ethics, and community. He coordinates the Exeter Masculinities Research Unit and is currently working on an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant-funded project entitled Masculinity and the Ethics of Porosity in “Post-AIDS” Gay Porn, theorising gay “pig” masculinities, their visual mediation, and their emergence in tandem with the introduction of antiretroviral therapies for the management and prophylaxis of HIV infection.
In English.
*Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is Still Beginning (2019) was recently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hear Bordowitz discuss the work here.
