The only contemporary arts organization fully committed to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness, Visual AIDS utilizes arts projects as a means of provoking dialogue, honoring the work of afflicted artists, and preserving the cultural legacy of the AIDS movement. In recognition of World AIDS Day, the organization launched Day Without Art in 1989 as a day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis, and during its peak years the program expanded to over 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, and academic institutions. In 1997, Day With(out) Art became a day with art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that drew attention to the continuing pandemic. Although the name was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists, Visual AIDS added parentheses to the program title in order to emphasize the artistic beauty and cultural necessity of these thought-provoking exhibitions.
This year marks the 25th annual Day With(out) Art on World AIDS Day, and honoring the occasion is a series of original short videos entitled ALTERNATE ENDINGS. The program—which premiered Monday and will run until December 7th at 50 US screening locations in addition to Canada, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates—is the result of a close collaboration with the Visual AIDS community and filmmaker Tom Kalin, who commissioned seven artists to create new and provocative work about the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic.
ALTERNATE ENDINGS highlights the diverse voices of Rhys Ernst, Glen Fogel, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hi Tiger, Tom Kalin, My Barbarian, and Julie Tolentino, who use short videos comprised of found footage, live performance, still images, and robotic cameras to weave the connections between charged personal experiences and the public narrative of HIV/AIDS.
Check out the official video synopses (with the videos included!) below, and you can also visit Visual AIDS’ website for a complete list of screening venues.
ALTERNATE ENDINGS Video Synopses
Rhys Ernst, Dear Lou Sullivan, 2014, 6 min
This new work by LA-based artist Rhys Ernst invokes the story of Lou Sullivan, trans man and AIDS activist largely responsible for establishing the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. Cut with images of Ernst’s own examination of this figure and trans history, the video is structured by the search for and desire to identify transmasculine elders and an intergenerational exploration of gay transmasculine identity. Utilizing interview footage, excerpts of Sullivan’s book “Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” VHS gay porn, and Grindr chats, Dear Lou Sullivan is a meditation on the life of the late trans man and AIDS activist that explores the bodily intersection of transmasculine gay and HIV+ identity.
Glen Fogel, 7 Years Later, 2014, 4 min
For 7 Years Later, Glen Fogel visited his ex-boyfriend Nathan Lee in Providence, RI and videotaped a conversation between the two of them. They discuss the events that led to their breakup 7 years ago, while a robotic camera autonomously scans the apartment. The videos is edited to look as though it is a seamless single take, a time warp in which Fogel and Lee appear in multiple places in the apartment at the same time.
Lyle Ashton Harris, Selections from the Ektachrome Archive 1986-1996, 2014, 7min
Lyle Ashton Harris’ Selections from the Ektachrome Archive 1986–1996 is a snapshot from 1986–1996, chronicling the moments—now memories—of this charged decade. This selection features over one hundred images taken by Harris from his extensive archive of Ektachrome photographs. Harris captures creatives and intellectuals including Nan Goldin, Samuel R Delaney, Stuart Hall, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Isaac Julien, Catherine Opie and Marlon Riggs among others in both intimate settings as well as now-historic events such as the Black Popular Culture Conference (1991), the opening for the Whitney’s landmark Black Male exhibition (1994), and his travels from New York to London and Los Angeles to Rome. In Selections from the Ektachrome Archive 1986–1996, bedroom scenes and personal mementos punctuate public presentations and social gatherings, as a register of Harris’ life during the height of the AIDS crisis and its impact. Moreover, this archive takes the temperature of America’s recent past and charts its radical epistemological shifts.
Hi Tiger, The Village, 2014, 7 min
Hi Tiger, the Portland, Maine based art-punk band fronted by visual artist and performer Derek Jackson, recreates the song “The Village” by New Order. Originally, New Order recorded the song as an upbeat new wave tune in 1982. With Hi Tiger’s re-imagining some 30 years later, The Village becomes a torch song that meditates on themes of love and loss, complicity and defiance. In the context of HIV and AIDS, the song becomes a love letter to those that have passed and a call to arms for the ones who remain.
Tom Kalin, Ashes, 2014, 6 min
For Ashes, Tom Kalin photographed thousands of high resolution still images and “stitched” them into a moving image. While borrowing library books for research on another project, Kalin discovered, glued to the endpapers, ordinary “due date” ledgers stamped with dates spanning three decades. Inspired by these tiny ledgers—like skin or palimpsests that recorded an analogue history, an accumulation of many gestures—Kalin combines quotidian pictures snatched from his daily life with an evocative musical track by ongoing collaborator Doveman (Thomas Bartlett). The film layers dates and moments from Kalin’s personal world with the public and global history of AIDS.
My Barbarian, Counterpublicity, 2014, 7 min
My Barbarian’s Counterpublicity is a staged video performance based on an essay about Pedro Zamora, AIDS activist and star of the Real World: San Francisco, written by José Esteban Muñoz in his book, “Disidentifications.” The three members of My Barbarian re-perform scenes from The Real World in an alienated style, resisting the effect of “reality tv” even as they interrogate its politics, contrasting these scenes with the embodied performance of 90s-inspired music videos, with lyrics adapted from Muñoz’s theory of Queer counterpublic spheres that operate against the dominance of racism and homophobia.
Julie Tolentino, evidence, 2014, 4 min
In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino’s self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino’s body, evidenceopens up to the list’s potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss.
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