Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) and Qu’ART are 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 that will be presented from December 1st to December 6th.
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).
The program will be presented in a looping screening in the Microcinema from December 1st to December 6th. The final screening on December 6th will be at Club SAW with a keynote presentation by Ash Barbu.
About the Program
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.
*Jennings recites this poem in the video Here We Are: Voices of Black Women Who Live with HIV, created by Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes for Day With(out) Art 2022: Being and Belonging.
About the speaker
Ash Barbu is an Ottawa-based artist, curator, and educator whose work examines the relationship between trans autobiography, queer theory, and curatorial studies. For more than 10 years, Barbu has researched AIDS cultural histories while expanding their interdisciplinary artistic praxis to involve diverse collaborators and audiences. They hold an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto and were a recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. Recently, they were the Guest Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts and a Research Fellow at Visual AIDS, New York. Their writings on politics, aesthetics, and ethics have appeared in publications that include Esse art + opinions, Espace art actuel, Canadian Art, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and OnCurating. Alongside their curatorial work, Barbu has facilitated student workshops for organizations such as Cambridge Art Galleries, the Art Gallery of Guelph, and the US Embassy in Ottawa. In November 2023, Barbu and Aylin Abbasi presented their first feature-length film Mother Ladder Night at the DARC Microcinema, Ottawa.
What is Visual AIDS?
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.
DARC’s Microcinema programming is always FREE, donations are always welcome.
