Day With(out) Art Film Screening: Red Reminds Me…

Event time: 
Thursday, December 5, 2024 - 5:30pm

Day With(out) Art Film Screening: Red Reminds Me…
Thursday, December 5, 5:30pm
Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel Street)

In recognition of the 2024 Day With(out) Art, the Yale LGBTQ Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Public Humanities at Yale are proud to partner with Visual AIDS to present a screening of Red Reminds Me…, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. Cierra Michele Peters (MFA in Graphic Design, 2026) will introduce the program. This event is cosponsored by the Yale LGBTQ Center, the Yale University Art Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund, and Public Humanities at Yale.

Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has 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.
 
Red Reminds Me… will feature newly commissioned short videos by artists working across the world:
 
Gian Cruz (Philippines)
Milko Delgado (Panama)
Imani Maryahm Harrington (USA)
David Oscar Harvey (USA)
Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia)
Nixie (Belgium)
Vasilios Papapitsios (USA)
 
The artists in this 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.