Untitled will be screened at participating venues throughout New York City and across the United States at over 55 major museums, arts organizations, community groups and colleges. Click here for a complete list of screenings and venues.

Visual AIDS launched Day With(out) Art as a World AIDS Day initiative in 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis.

With filmmakers, Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz, and Encke King, Visual AIDS has distributed Untitled a 60-minute non-linear montage of archival and pop footage recalling the passionate activism sparked by the early years of the AIDS crisis. Visual AIDS is providing all participating venues with a viewer's Resource Guide in an effort to further a critical engagement with HIV/AIDS.

Viewers can visit the Untitled website built for Day With(out) Art 2011 by Creative Time here to watch a trailer, view the list of participating venues, access the Resource Guide, respond to the film, and engage in dialogue about the work necessary to end AIDS.

In New York City, 16 partners including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MAD Museum of Art and Design, New Museum, and Creative Time at the IFC Center will present free screenings and attendant programs. In conjunction with Justin Vivian Bond's exhibition, Mx. Bond will host a live screening and perform a song to accompany the film at Participant Inc. Click here for a complete list of programs and screenings.

Visual AIDS and Creative Time will host a special discussion for viewers at the 6:30 PM screening at the IFC Center. The filmmakers will be present.

How do we weave the long and critical history of AIDS activism into the movement today? How can we understand critical and cultural interventions like Untitled and Day With(out)Art in context of Occupy actions? How can we integrate these analysis, and others, into the important goal of identifying a politics of impoverishment?

With respondents:

• Malik Gaines is an Assistant Professor of Art at Hunter College. With the group My Barbarian, Gaines has performed and exhibited internationally. Solo exhibitions have included Participant Inc. (NYC), Hammer Museum (LA) and Museo El Eco (Mexico City). Performance sites have included the Kitchen, New Museum, Whitney Museum, (NYC), LACMA, MOCA, REDCAT (LA), Power Plant, (Toronto), De Appel (Amsterdam), El Matadero (Madrid), Galleria Civica (Trento), and Townhouse Gallery (Cairo). The group was included in Performa 05 and 07, the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials, the 2007 Montreal Biennial, and the 2009 Baltic Triennial. As a writer and curator, Gaines has focused on the politics of representation. He has contributed to numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and has written monograph texts for artists including Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon and Wangechi Mutu. He has organized exhibitions and programs independently, including "Fade: African American Artists in LA" for the City of Los Angeles (2004) and "Quadruple-Consciousness" at Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2010). Gaines is Curator-At-Large at LAXART, Los Angeles, where he has organized exhibitions for Colter Jacobsen, Kalup Linzy, and Anna Sew Hoy, as well as numerous performances and programs. Current projects include the Pacific Standard Time performance festival and the first Los Angeles Biennial, co-organized with the Hammer Museum. Gaines holds as Ph.D. in Performance Studies, having researched performances of race and gender in the 1960s.
• Shanti Avirgan is a writer, researcher, and documentary filmmaker who grew up in Tanzania and Costa Rica and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked in alliance with AIDS activist groups including Health GAP, CHAMP and the Student Global AIDS Campaign. Her first feature-length documentary, Pills Profits Protest: Chronicle of the Global AIDS Movement, premiered on the Showtime cable network in 2005 and she recently collaborated with veteran filmmaker Jean Carlomusto on Sex in an Epidemic (2010), an historical documentary about the sexual politics of HIV/AIDS in the United States. Shanti has taught at NYU and Brooklyn College (CUNY) and currently teaches medical anthropology in Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa for the School for International Training / IHP Program in Health & Community.
• Che Gossett has been involved in political activism for prison abolitionism and gender self determination, campaigns to end "prostitution free zones" in Washington DC and currently is a steering committee member of the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance. Che is a contributor to the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press) and Stand Up: The Politics of Racial Uplift (South End Press) about the criminalization of HIV and abolition as an HIV/AIDS issue, forthcoming this spring.

Moderated by Nato Thompson, Creative Time Curator

Please join the dialogue.

Discussion*: 7:45 - 8:45 (following 6:30PM screening)

* Reserve Your Seat Here -- RSVP only

IFC Center
323 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY

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About Untitled

Untitled, 2010
DVD, 60 minutes, Color, Stereo

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 and continues today with international struggle and expression.

In 2010, artist Jim Hodges was invited to give a lecture on the billboard project of Félix González-Torres at San Antonio's Artpace. He teamed up with fellow filmmakers Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King to create Untitled. Neither a portrait nor a documentary about González-Torres, the film was an attempt to place the viewer "in his room," that is to say, the filmmakers worked to create, for the viewer, an understanding of the influences and contexts within which González-Torres was working. 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.

Artists' Bios

Jim Hodges has created a broad range of work exploring themes of fragility, temporality, love, and death using a highly original and poetic vocabulary. His works frequently deploy different materials and techniques, from ready-made objects to traditional media, such as graphite and ink. He has been the subject of many solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe and has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He currently lives and works in New York City. jimhodges.com

Carlos Marques da Cruz works with artists, performers, and filmmakers in Lisbon, Paris, Venice, Rome, Genoa, Spoleto, Naples, Milan, Palermo, Madrid, Brussels, London, and New York.

Encke King is a film and video producer, editor, and writer based in New York.

Filmmakers Wish to Thank

Artpace, Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Thomas G. Lannon New York Public Library, Jim Hubbard, Barbara Gladstone, Miciah Hussey, Molly Epstein, Visual AIDS, Creative Time.

Untitled Resource Guide

In an effort to honor the sense of endlessness that Untitled suggests, Visual AIDS produced a Resource Guide as a starting point for provoking both public and private conversation. The Resource Guide contains vocabulary, HIV information, and an AIDS timeline, as well as thoughts and questions to encourage further engagement with the film and the issues surrounding it. Click here download a Resource Guide.

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