Screening

RISD Museum is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021 with a premiere of eight short videos highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic. The program features newly commissioned work by Katherine Cheairs, Cristóbal Guerra, Danny Kilbride, Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Uriah Bussey, Beto Pérez, Steed Taylor, and J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project.
From histories of harm reduction and prison activism to the long-term effects of HIV medication, ENDURING CARE centers stories of collective care, mutual aid, and solidarity while pointing to the negligence of governments and nonprofits. The program’s title suggests a dual meaning, honoring the perseverance and commitment of care workers yet also addressing the potential for harm from medications and healthcare providers. ENDURING CARE disrupts the assumption that an epidemic can be solved with pharmaceuticals alone, recasting community work as a lasting form of medicine.
Free. Registration required. An email with a Zoom link for the program will be sent to registrants.
Register
Presented with RISD’s Office of Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE). ISE cultivates an environment that recognizes an ever-changing campus and global community.
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.
Video Synopses
Steed Taylor, I Am a Long-Term AIDS Survivor (7:18)Through a chorus of voices, Steed Taylor explores the difficulties of being a long-term AIDS survivor and the unexpected health problems facing many senior survivors.
Beto Pérez, In the Future (7:00)In the Future tells the stories of people living with HIV in Mexico who have been unable to access treatment because of government corruption and widespread theft and looting of medication.
Cristóbal Guerra, Nobleza(s) de Sangre (10:24)Two fragmented interviews with artists living with HIV in Puerto Rico mediate an audiovisual invocation of the late Boricua poet Manuel Ramos Otero who passed away from complications of the virus in 1990. Guerra sets out to translate work Manuel deemed untranslatable, investigating the ongoing passions that informed his work.
Danny Kilbride, The Mersey Model (7:37)Danny Kilbride interviews Professor John Ashton, a public health official who helped institute the Mersey Model of Harm Reduction in Liverpool in 1986, the first government-funded needle exchange program in the UK.
Katherine Cheairs, Voices at the Gate (7:57)Voices at the Gate is an experimental documentary video juxtaposing the bucolic landscapes inhabited by women’s prisons with archival and contemporary audio recordings of poems, essays and interviews by current and formerly incarcerated women of color living with HIV and AIDS.
J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project, 滴水希望 (Hope Drops) (8:18)A collaborative video project made with women living in Taiwan who use their cameras to process stress and stigma, and to share their experiences living with HIV.
Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Uriah Bussey, #Medstrike: Confronting the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (duration TBA)A chronicle of Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad’s 2017 medication strike against the Mazzoni Center, a LGBT health clinic in Philadelphia, and the direct action campaign by the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative that preceded it.
The artists in this year's program were selected through an open call process juried by Ivy Arce, Jean Carlomusto, Thomas Allen Harris, and Mathew Rodriguez.
Over 100 museums, universities, and other organizations will present the videos on/around December 1. See the full list of partners to find a screening near you.
Plus: tune in for a virtual artist talk on December 4, presented by MOCA LA. Details and RSVP here.
Image: J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project, 滴水希望 (Hope Drops), 2021. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021. Still courtesy of Visual AIDS