ICA LA is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me…, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. 

Red Reminds Me… will feature newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz (Philippines), Milko Delgado (Panama), Imani Harrington (USA), David Oscar Harvey (USA), Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia), Nixie (Belgium), Vasilios Papapitsios (USA).

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 deeper, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.

Red Reminds Me… will be screened all day at ICA LA from 11AM–6PM. In conjunction, ICA LA will host a conversation from 3PM–5PM bringing together Scientia Sexualis artists Demian DinéYazhi’ and Joey Terrill. This discussion will explore their AIDS activism through art and writing. Visitors will also have the chance to view DinéYazhi’s mural Poz Since 1492, a work originally created as a free poster for Day With(out) Art in 2016.

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.