SAIC Galleries was proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2020 by presenting TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States. The video program brought together artists working across the world: 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 did not intend to give a comprehensive account of the global AIDS epidemic, but provided 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 covered a broad range of subjects, such as the erasure of women living with HIV in South America, 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 offered an opportunity to reflect on the resonances and differences between the two epidemics and their uneven distribution across geography, race, and gender.
TRANSMISSIONS premiereed on November 30 at 6pm EST as part of a special online screening event hosted by Visual AIDS and supported by SAIC Galleries. A live Q&A with the commissioned artists followed the screening. The video program is available to view online at visualaids.org/transmissions.
Jorge Bordello, Ministry of Health, 2020. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2020. Still courtesy of Visual AIDS
