Vivent Health and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver are proud to partner with @visual_aids for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me…, a film of seven short works reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. The program also includes a discussion by Dr. Andy Scahill, Founder & CEO of The Rainbow Cult and University of Colorado Denver Assistant Film Professor, on queer filmmakers' response to HIV and AIDS in the ‘80s.
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.
Watch the trailer here.
