Experiment as Method, Care as Practice

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, June 4, 2026 at 7pm for Experiment as Method, Care as Practice: Four Decades of HIV & AIDS Shorts, a program presented in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Visual AIDS, and MIX NYC, featuring twelve experimental films and videos spanning 1986 to 2024 and sourced from the collections of the three organizations.

The program traces how queer and trans filmmakers have developed new visual languages to render the complexities of life and death with HIV, as the wider community simultaneously formulated ways to survive through it. The provision of care, the insistence on love, the question of pleasure, and the importance of self-documentation in queer life all continue to accrue new meaning and urgency across distinct, ongoing phases of the epidemic.

There are some broad continuities within the works shown here: vehement formal experimentation, a refusal of limitation, the incorporation of spoken word and poetry, and the use of direct testimony alongside elements of documentary practice. Yet at the same time, clear divergences in depicting HIV arise; differing approaches to abstraction and representation, variations in tone and affect, tensions between anonymity and claiming an HIV-positive identity, shifts between individual and collective experience, and the use of analog and digital formats, collage, and other hybrid forms.

By placing these works alongside one another, this selection seeks to both parse and pass beyond persistent representational tropes of life with the virus. It also aims to forge a dialogue between Visual AIDS, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and MIX NYC, and to explore how these organizations have incubated and provided alternative spaces for formally and politically rigorous work since the 1980s. This shared experimental visual legacy can be read against the current evolving context of authoritarian governance, cuts to research and medical funding, rising queer and transphobia, racism, and ongoing global inequities in health outcomes.

In this moment of sociopolitical urgency, these audiovisual evocations of resistance, resilience, joy, and subjectivity within HIV-affected communities bring the ancestral archive into dialogue with HIV/AIDS contemporaneity and futurity. Challenging the myth that AIDS is “over,” this program elucidates the multifaceted and intergenerational narrative of the ongoing epidemic, and the ways in which HIV-affected communities have prevailed in spite of serophobic political, medical, and cultural paradigms for over forty years." Is this really matches what the organization provided for us?

Program

Lawrence Brose, An Individual Desires Solution (1986, 16mm-to-digital, color, sound, 16 minutes)
A structural cine-poem concerning death through the struggle for answers and survival of Brose’s boyfriend Kevin, who asked him to redefine AIDS as “An Individual Desires Solution.” Distorted telephone recordings and metaphorical imagery evoke terror, helplessness, and intimacy during the early AIDS crisis.

Cynthia Madansky and Alisa Lebow, Internal Combustion(1995, video, color, sound, 7 minutes)
Internal Combustion breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, the piece reflects on survival, mourning, power, and loss within the epidemic.

Michelle Handelman, Safer Sexual Techniques in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1988, 16mm-to-digital, black-and-white, sound, 10 minutes)
Inspired by structuralist filmmaking, Handelman’s first film offers a surreal impression of safe sex during the AIDS crisis. Constructed across four rolls of 16mm film, it combines in-camera effects, sexual illusion, and manipulated sound into an arcane storybook of risk and desire.

Charles Lum, facts. SUCK (2004, digital, color, sound, 12 minutes)
A short film portraying Charles Lum’s conversations with doctors, nurses, and pharmacists alongside direct-to-camera reflections on desire and self-image. Intensely personal, the film addresses the artist’s ambivalence surrounding sex, discretion, and life as an HIV-positive gay man.

Glen Fogel, 7 Years Later (2014, digital, color, sound, 4 minutes)
Glen Fogel revisits his ex-boyfriend seven years after their breakup, recording a conversation while a robotic camera scans the apartment. Edited to resemble a seamless single take, the film creates an uncanny meditation on intimacy, memory, and time.

Clifford Prince King, Kiss of Life (2022, digital, color, sound, 7 minutes)
In Kiss of Life, four Black people describe their experiences living with HIV. Conversations surrounding disclosure, rejection, and self-love unfold through visual poetry and dreamscapes.

Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta Huntertexas, Los Amarillos (2022, digital, color, sound, 10 minutes)
In Colombia, many people living with HIV experience jaundice as a side effect of low-cost antiretroviral drugs supplied by the government. Los Amarillos addresses the alienation and hypervisibility produced by these bodily changes.

Lourdes Portillo, Sometimes My Feet Go Numb (1995, video, black-and-white, sound, 2 minutes)
This black-and-white video poem is a first person account of some of the side effects of living with AIDS and the meds that make living possible.

Juanita Mohammad, Two Men & a Baby (1992, video, color, sound, 7 minutes)
Ray and Tyrone are raising Ray’s nephew Eric, whose mother died of AIDS-related illness. When Eric contracts pneumonia, they discover that he is HIV positive. A poignant story of living with AIDS and family love.

J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project, 滴水希望 (Hope Drops) (2021, digital, color, sound, 8.5 minutes)
A collaborative video project made with women living in Taiwan who use their cameras to process stress and stigma, and to share their experiences living with HIV.

Jim Hubbard, Two Marches (1989, 16mm-to-digital, color, sound, 8 minutes)
Scenes from the 1979 and 1987 national gay marches on Washington are juxtaposed to reveal shifts within the gay liberation movement during the AIDS crisis, as hope gives way to mourning, frustration, and political urgency.

Imani Maryahm Harrington, Realms Remix (2024, digital, color, sound, 8.5 minutes)
Through a collage of poetry and archival images, Realms Remix traces memories and sensations of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.

The event is co-curated by Blake Paskal and Kyle Croft (Visual AIDS), Lewis McClenaghan (MIX NYC), and Matt McKinzie (The Film-Makers’ Cooperative). Special thanks to Blake Pruitt, Alex Smith, Ariel Ottey, Jac Renée Bruneau (MIX NYC) and Zacarias Gonzalez (The Film-Makers’ Cooperative).

For community members who cannot afford a ticket but would like to attend this event, please contact Blake Paskal at bpaskal@visualaids.org.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave, a garage door, leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.