TRANSMISSIONS Day With(out) Art 2020
MACBA is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for the Day With(out) Art 2020, by presenting TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos examining the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States. The video program brings together artists working across the globe: Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Gevi Dimitrakopoulou (Greece), Las Indetectables (Chile), Lucía Egaña Rojas (Chile/Spain), Charan Singh (India/UK), and George Stanley Nsamba (Uganda).
The program is not intended to give a comprehensive account of the global AIDS epidemic, but it does provide a platform for a diversity of voices from beyond the United States, offering insight into the divergent and overlapping experiences of people living with HIV around the world today. The six commissioned videos cover a broad range of subjects, such as how women living with HIV in South America are rendered invisible, ineffective Western public health campaigns in India, and the realities of stigma and disclosure for young people in Uganda.
As the world continues to adapt to living with a new virus, COVID-19, these videos offer an opportunity to reflect on the resonances and differences between the two epidemics and their uneven distribution across geography, race, and gender.
Project introduction and subsequent discussion led by Lucía Egaña, the artist chosen by Visual AIDS for this edition of a Day Without Art, who also collaborates regularly with the MACBA.
Participants
Jorge BordelloGevi DimitrakopoulouLas IndetectablesLucía EgañaCharan SinghGeorge Stanley Nsamba
Programme
Tuesday, December 1, 2020. Meier Auditorium, at 7:00 pm
The video programming, together with the introduction by Lucía Egaña, will be available on this website until December 8, 2020.
Introduction by Lucía Egaña
SCREENING OF THE VIDEOS:
Jorge Bordello. Ministry of Health
Synopsis:Ministry of Health employs the aesthetics of horror movies and silent film to evoke the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on four men living with HIV in the city of Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Gevi Dimitrakopoulou. This is Right; Zak, Life and After
Synopsis:This is Right: Zak, Life and After is a portrait of Zak Kostopoulos, a well-known queer AIDS activist who was killed in a public lynching in Athens in 2018. Zak's chosen family and community highlight Zak's activist life and the response that his murder has galvanized.
Las Indetectables. Me Cuido
Synopsis:Me Cuido (“I take care of myself”/”I’m careful”) questions the relationship between colonial paradigms of health, religious guilt, and the stigmatization of people living with HIV in the context of Chile’s capitalist and neoliberal regime.
Lucía Egaña Rojas. Female Disappearance Syndrome
Synopsis: Lucía Egaña Rojas challenges gendered representations of HIV and AIDS, investigating what Lina Meruane has termed the “female disappearance syndrome”—the elimination of women living with HIV from conversations about the epidemic. Some of the contents of the video are drawn from the research done with HIV-positive women in the city of Buenos Aires by psychologist Julieta Obiols, ex-student in the Independent Studies Programme.
Charan Singh. They Called it Love, But Was it Love?
Synopsis:They Called it Love, But Was it Love? depicts scenes from the lives of kothis living in India. Reduced to a “risk group” by public health campaigns and misunderstood through Western notions of gender and sexuality, these protagonists have real lives and inhabit unique worlds with their own quests for fulfilment and love.
George Stanley Nsamba. Finding Purpose
Synopsis: Finding Purpose reflects on the experience of producing a film about the lives of teens born with HIV in Uganda and the pervasive stigma that surrounded the project.
Public Programs
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