A free film screening on World AIDS Day co-presented by Visual AIDS, Vtape, and Images Festival
Screening times: noon, 2pm, 4pm, and 6pm
Program length: 90 minutes
Location: Vtape Video Gallery, 401 Richmond St W, #452
Limited seating, please RSVP your preferred time to info@vtape.org
Untitled + Alternate Endings
To commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS has been working closely with Tom Kalin to produce a screening event titled Alternate Endings. For the screening, Lyle Ashton Harris, Rhys Ernst, Glen Fogel, Derek Jackson, Tom Kalin, My Barbarian, and Julie Tolentino were commissioned to make short films (2-5 minutes) about the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, focusing on the issues of today.
These short works will be paired with Jim Hodges, Encke King, and Carlos Marques da Cruz’s 60-minute film Untitled (2010), a portrait of Felix González-Torres, an artist who died in 1996 from complications of AIDS. Beginning with a reflection on the early AIDS epidemic, Untitled eschews a linear narrative to introduce a fractious timeline, moving from the sublime to the tragic and back again. By juxtaposing mainstream network news, activist footage, artists’ work, and popular entertainment from the last turbulent decades, Untitled references regimes of power that precipitated a generation of AIDS and queer activism. In Hodges’s words, “In this way, the framing of the artist can become a way to project any number of people, endlessly.” Untitled can therefore be considered to be as much about González-Torres and the AIDS crisis as it can be seen as grappling with the continuum of global dehumanization.
Day Without Art began on December 1, 1989 as a national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, some 800 art and AIDS groups in the U.S. participated in the first Day Without Art, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or sponsoring special exhibitions about AIDS. Since then, Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8000 museums, galleries, art centres, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and universities take part.
For more information, please contact Amy Fung at amy@imagesfestival.com.