World AIDS Day in the Arsenał + Polish EIDS + Visual AIDS

On Tuesday, 1 December, Municipal Gallery Arsenał and Biennale Warszawa, alongside institutions like Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Studio Museum in Harlem and MOCA in Los Angeles, join the celebration of the World AIDS Day. We will show film from this years’ edition of Isual AIDS and for the forst time ever we will present two publications initiated as part of the research exhibition “Creative Sick States: AIDS, HIV, CANCER” in the Municipal Gallery Arsenał in Poznań (8.11.2019–12.01.2020).

Streaming of the conversation and the film programme of Visual AIDS: Transmissions will be available on Biennale Warszawa channels.

The book which summarises the exhibition, “Creative Sick States: AIDS, HIV, CANCER” edited by Zofia Nierodzińska and Jacek Zwierzyński, juxtaposes the activism of Polish “Amazons” [breast cancer survivors and activists] with activities around HIV in a broad, illness-related perspective, from the Berlin years of Audre Lorde to the COVID-19 pandemic. The publication will become available online free of charge on the day of the event. Meanwhile, “The Small Publication on HIV” prepared by Szymon Adamczak in cooperation with Luiza Kępińska, is an attempt to present a cross-section of Polish cultural output concerning HIV and AIDS through in-depth interview with artists, commentaries, reflection and a selection of archive materials.

In the second part, we will show films from this year’s edition of Day With(out) Art Visual AIDS: Transmissions, concerning the impact of HIV and AIDS in countries outside the American cultural context. Invited creators include: Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Gevi Dimitrakopoulou (Greece), Las Indetectables (Chile), Lucía Egaña Rojas (Chile/Spain), Charan Singh (India/UK) and George Stanley Nsamba (Uganda).

POLISH EIDS invites everyone to take part in four days of events inspired by the title of Hervé Guibert’s cult book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. The slogan of HIV 2020 conference (an alternative to AIDS 2020 conference) emphasises the importance of the active participation of the community of people living with HIV. As POLISH EIDS, this year we would also like to draw attention to the activities of artists, activists and teams working in Poland which, in our opinion, change the culture of the conversation about HIV, focusing in their work primarily on the experiences of people living with HIV. We want to underline the role of friendship and shared reflection on the epidemic – the programme will feature an extraordinary event: streaming of the documentary “50/50”, unknown to the wider audience, and devoted to the memory of Krzysztof Nowiński, as well as access to the corresponding video work “Plus/Minus” by Karol Radziszewski.

POLISH EIDS is an artistic and research platform which aims at deepening the cultural reception of issues related to HIV and AIDS in Poland. It initiates and supports unconventional research, activates archives, educates and creates a public program to better understand and talk about Polish eids.