In partnership with MOCA and The Studio Museum in Harlem, Visual AIDS presents a program of seven short videos highlighting under-told stories of HIV and AIDS from the perspective of artists living with HIV across the world. Whether navigating sex and intimacy or confronting stigma and isolation, Being and Belonging centers the emotional realities of living with HIV today. How does living with HIV shift the ways that a person experiences, asks for, or provides love, support and belonging? The program is a call for belonging from those that have been stigmatized within their communities of left out of mainstream HIV/AIDS narratives.
Being and Belonging will premiere at over 100 museums and arts organizations in conjunction with Day With(out) Art / World AIDS Day 2022.
The event will be livestreamed.
Following the screening, Clifford Prince King and Davina "Dee" Conner will join Blake Paskal of Visual AIDS for a conversation around their practices and the themes addressed in Being & Belonging.
Films
Camila Arce, Memoria Vertical, 2022.
Clifford Prince King, Kiss of Life, 2022.
Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes, Here We Are: Voices of Black Women Who Live with HIV, 2022.
Jaewon Kim, Nuance, 2022.
Jhoel Zempoalteca and La Jerry, Lxs dxs bichudas, 2022.
Mikiki, Red Flags: A Love Letter, 2022.
Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta Huntertexas, Los Amarillos, 2022.
All films commissioned by Visual AIDS for Being & Belonging.
Camila Arce (she/her) is an artivista from Rosario, Argentina who has been living with HIV since she was born 27 years ago. She writes about her daily life and publishes poetry and social, political, and economic commentary @sidiosa. Her work is committed to the needs and realities of women living with HIV and above all the experiences of verticales, those who were born with HIV or who seroconverted through breastfeeding. She is a fervent advocate for the release of drug patents and a HIV cure.
Davina “Dee” Conner (she/her) is an HIV educator, podcast host, and international speaker who has been living with HIV since 1997. Her podcast, Pozitively Dee Discussions, won ADAP’s 2017 Leadership Award for working to dispel internalized stigma and change how society views HIV. Davina received the Persistent Advocacy Award from AIDS Watch in 2019, and has been featured in numerous magazines for her ongoing advocacy including a&u, Positively Aware, Denver’s 5280, POZ Magazine, HIV Plus, and Health Stories Project. She works against HIV criminalization as a member of the Positive Justice Project; is a contributing writer for h-i-v.net; is a board member of Las Vegas Ryan White and Nevada's HIV Prevention Planning Group (HPPG). She is also the Creative Engagement Outreach Specialist for Prevention Access Campaign (U=U).
Karin Hayes (she/her) is an award-winning documentary director and producer. Her credits include We’re Not Broke (Sundance Film Festival/iTunes), The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt (HBO/CNN), Held Hostage in Colombia (History/SundanceTV), Pip & Zastrow: An American Friendship (PBS/MPT), and the documentary series: That Animal Rescue Show (Paramount+) and Truth and Power (Participant Media). She has also worked on projects for Supper Club, Film45, National Geographic, Discovery, and Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America (PGA), Film Fatales, and the International Documentary Association (IDA).
Jaewon Kim (he/him) is a Korean artist currently based in Seoul, South Korea. Kim primarily works with video, photography, and installation to discuss the lives of queer people and people living with HIV/AIDS. Working from his personal experiences, Kim devises narratives that trace moments from the past and the future. Much of his work considers how the force of disease affects personal relationships. Recent solo exhibitions include Back then, If Bell Doesn’t Ring (2020), which dealt with specific locations and their connotations, and Romantic Fantasy (2021), which conflated the HIV virus with a romantic relationship.
Clifford Prince King (he/him) is an artist living and working in New York and Los Angeles. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer black man. King has recently exhibited work at Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), Higher Pictures (New York City), Leslie Lohman Museum (New York City), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), MASS MoCA, Marc Selwyn Gallery (Beverly Hills), and Stars Gallery (Los Angeles). Publications carrying King’s images as commissioned work and features include Aperture, Dazed, i-D, T Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, Vogue and The Wall Street Journal. King was runner-up for the Robert Giard Emerging Artist Grant in 2020.
Camilo Acosta Huntertexas (he/him) is a visual artist born in Ibagué-Tolima, Colombia with a focus on audiovisual projects, video editing, experimental video, VJ sets, and music video production. His video work has been exhibited in Spain, Germany, Mexico, Canada, France among others. He has also developed curatorial projects involving performance, video, and live arts in both conventional and unconventional spaces. Acosta is a co-founder and active member of the House of Tupamaras, a collective committed to research and creative production around issues of gender, performance, and public space. He is also part of the performance collective Street Jizz.
Santiago Lemus (he/him) is an artist born in Sogamoso, Colombia. His interdisciplinary work uses organic matter, image, and sound to address the relationship between art, nature, and landscape through installations, interventions, performances, photography, and video. Lemus’s work has been exhibited in cities such as Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Berlin, among others. He is co-founder of Tomamos la Palabra, a collective that creates interventions in public spaces denouncing homophobia, transphobia, racism and violence.
Mikiki (they/them) is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada. Their work has been presented. Their identity as a queer artist and activist has necessitated a porous boundary between what is labelled art-making or activism versus ‘being’ in the world. Mikiki has worked as a high school sexuality educator, a bathhouse attendant, drag karaoke hostess, in various capacities in the gay men's health and HIV response, and in harm reduction outreach and HIV testing literally all over Canada. Mikiki is irregularly found hosting their Golden Girls screening and queer cultural studies lecture series “Rose Beef.”
Jhoel Zempoalteca (he/him) is a visual artist and educator born in Tlaxcala, Mexico. His work seeks to produce a counter-pedagogy by deconstructing the visual imaginaries surrounding dissident and seropositive experiences. Zempoalteca holds a BA in Visual Arts from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda.” His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Guatemala, and Spain.
La Jerry (they/them) is a non-binary folk dancer born and raised in Juchitan, Mexico. They have participated in numerous folk dance gatherings and festivals in Mexico. They are currently developing their drag persona from their perspective as a non-binary, racialized, and seropositive folk dancer, challenging the heteronormativity that governs social and cultural representations of Mexico.
Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator, with Amelia Charter, Producer of Performance and Programs and Brian Dang, Programming Coordinator.
Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs is founded by Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.
