Location:

nGbK, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin

Artists:

Camilo Acosta & Santiago Lemus, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Jorge Bordello, Kat Cheairs, Naya de Souza, Pascale Espinosa, Ato Kwamina Hasford, Kia LaBeija, Ivan L. Munuera, Samuel Perea-Díaz, Hanna Schaich, Manuela Solano

nGbK working group:

Madi Awadalla, Pascale Espinosa, Elisabeth Krämer, Samuel Perea-Díaz, Hanna Schaich, Max Schnepf

More than four decades into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, biomedical treatment and prevention have become widely available in many parts of the world, but access remains uneven, and stigma persists. The group exhibition VIRAL INTIMACIES, which opens at nGbK as part of Berlin Art Week in September, confronts how the virus continues to shape life today—across bodies, borders, and the politics of care. Featuring video installations, paintings, sound works, performances, and sculptural pieces by 13 international contemporary artists, the exhibition explores HIV/AIDS not as a closed historical chapter but as a living reality. The show foregrounds intimacy as a political and aesthetic lens, centering voices and perspectives historically excluded from dominant narratives about HIV/AIDS.

Despite major scientific advances, the realities of living with HIV remain shaped by uneven access, stigma, and structural neglect. VIRAL INTIMACIES addresses HIV/AIDS not only as a medical condition, but as a deeply social and political issue—one that continues to shape bodies, relationships, and public life across geographies. The exhibition invites reflection on how the virus intersects with race, gender, sexuality, migration, and class, and foregrounds artistic practices that reclaim memory, dignity, and agency. In doing so, it also ties in with past nGbK projects such as Vollbild AIDS (1988) and LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX (2013/14).

The selected artworks reflect a wide range of personal and collective experiences with HIV. They include video installations, paintings, sound works, performances, and sculptural pieces. Many of the artists draw on autobiographical material or collaborate with communities impacted by the virus. Themes include personal and collective memory, the politics of medication and health infrastructures, experiences of stigma and hypervisibility, and HIV’s intersectionalities.

Participating artists include Kia LaBeija, who honours her HIV positive parents and grieves their deaths in her new work consisting of poetry, text and a photograph. Camilo Acosta and Santiago Lemus’s project Los Amarillos reflects on the physical and emotional side effects of low-quality HIV medication in Colombia. Kat Cheairs exposes natural footage to archival voices by women of colour to approach the intersection of incarceration and HIV/AIDS activism. Manuela Solano’s nostalgic and provocative paintings address Solano’s way of perceiving the world after an HIV-related infection. Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo’s video work centres the experiences of a Black woman living with HIV in Germany. Other contributions include Hanna Schaich’s reflections on personal memory, works by Jorge Bordello, Pascale Espinosa, and Ivan L. Munuera on the use of medication to treat and prevent HIV, Samuel Perea-Díaz’s engagement with the sonic dimensions of AIDS mortality data, and Ato Kwamina Hasford’s decolonial approaches to queerness and healing.

The accompanying public program challenges the widespread assumption that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is over. It creates space for discussion, reflection, and exchange across disciplines and communities—through performances, film screenings, workshops, and talks. Highlights include a performance by Naya de Souza, a screening of Zoe Mavroudi’s documentary on HIV criminalization in Greece, and a lecture-performance by Madi Awadalla, which traces the origin story of AIDS back to Berlin. Additional contributors include performer Federica Dauri, filmmaker Carla Simón, and the performance ConTatto by Federica Dauri, Hanna Schaich, Luca Della Corta, and Alain Nouchy. A key part of the program is a series of workshops with young people and school classes, designed to raise awareness and encourage open dialogue about HIV/AIDS as an ongoing social issue.

Viral Intimacies is supported in part by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and by the Embassy of Spain in Germany.

In cooperation with The Berlin Project Fund for Arts Education (Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung), Fundación “la Caixa”, and Kéré Foundation

Partner of Berlin Art Week

PROGRAMME

Opening

Wed, 10.9.25, 6.00 pm

VIRAL INTIMACIES launches with an evening of performances: In Why are you so negative?, Naya de Souza (aka Bundaskanzlerin) delivers a sharp critique of German politics and society, while the performance duo Los Amarillos (Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta) highlights global inequalities in access to HIV medication. Federica Dauri’s long durational performance LIMEN explores the threshold where symbolic and real boundaries meet.

Federica Dauri is a performance artist, choreographer and visual artist. For Viral Intimacies, Dauri presents LIMEN “threshold”, a long-durational performance which invokes a space of passage.

Unfolding within a sculptural environment of barbed wire and the artist’s naked body, moving with extreme slowness, precision and care, where every gesture negotiates sharp boundaries, slipping above and below, searching for passages where risk and possibility meet. The barbed wire becomes a metaphor for control, censorship, repression, and systemic regulation of intimacy, mobility and access to care. This threshold mirrors the exhibition’s concerns: a space in-between where intimacy, memory, and relationally circulate quietly yet powerfully to create a porous space where vulnerability, courage, exposure, and care coexist, allowing audiences to trace their own paths through what is revealed, suggested or left unfinished.

Los Amarillos, founded by Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta, two openly gay, HIV-positive visual artists, emerged from the short film Los Amarillos for Visual AIDS NYC’s Being & Belonging (22). Using voice, body, and audiovisual art, the collective explores health, stigma, and life with HIV through poetic imagery, performance, and collective actions. Manifiesto Amarillo extends this work, enacting 30 political-poetic images that question stigma, the role of art institutions, and the place of dissident bodies. Like daily medication, words are moistened and swallowed, carrying demand, the sacred, nostalgia, and utopia.

Naya de Souza works under different alter-egos like “LUX VENÉREA”, “Bundaskanzlerin,” transitioning between disciplines such as performance art, comedy/stand-up, and cooking. Multilingual by birth and transdisciplinary by heritage, Naya’s body of work transcends traditional boundaries, whether between disciplines, countries, or institutions. She views art as a perpetual process of immigration and translation. Her online Bundaskanzlerin serves as a social media critique of Germany’s exclusionary political/art world, utilizing found footage, video collages, photography and memes.

Viral Intimacies: Curatorial tour

Fri, 12.9.25, 7.00 pm

with Samuel Perea-Díaz, Pascale Espinosa in dialogue with Jorge Bordello

Curators and artists Samuel Perea-Díaz and Pascale Espinosa will take you on an intimate tour through the exhibition — tracing currents of desire, memory, and politics with a special focus on Jorge Bordello.

Bordello’s work slips between document and fiction, family archive and national narrative, body and public life. As a founding member of PA, a network of people living with HIV in Tlaxcala, he creates spaces where writing and art merge as collective expression. His work has been shown at the New Museum (New York), MOCA, MACBA, the Jumex Museum, and more. He has received the DocsMX Jury Prize and the Tlaxcala State Prize for Visual Arts, and presented his research at UNAM, the University of York, and MoMA.

Pascale Espinosa (aka Tomas Espinosa) moves between performance, video, sculpture, and installation to reflect on encounters and the time they require — to touch, to speak, to share. Their practice addresses memory and violence, especially in Colombia and in relation to non-binary identity. Pascale brings attention to hidden realities, reminding us: “We think we know what we are seeing. But in reality, we don’t.”

Samuel Perea-Díaz, artist, researcher, and lecturer, works at the intersection of sound and curation. His practice explores sonic activism, aural architecture, and the ways sound reshapes listening. With a background in architecture and an MA in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts, his PhD investigates the impact of HIV/AIDS on sound art. Through installations, field recordings, and listening workshops, Samuel transforms sound into a tool of memory and resistance.

Join them to experience the exhibition in all its intimacy.

On Poetry, Memories and Loss

Fri, 12.9.25, 5.00 pm

Workshop

In a creative writing workshop on the intersection of incarceration and HIV/AIDS activism, Kat Cheairs uses poems and essays as writing prompts—together with interviews produced by women of color in the early 1990s.

Limited capacity, please register via email: anmeldung@ngbk.de

This workshop invites participants to view the video “Voices at the Gate”, followed by a close reading of texts published by women at the intersection of incarceration and HIV/AIDS. We will reflect on what emerges from these readings, have an opportunity for silent writing and/or drawing time, and share our insights from our time together.

“Voices at the Gate” is a video work commissioned initially by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021. Recorded minutes from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Upstate New York, Voices is a meditation on the intersection of HIV/AIDS activism, carcerality, landscapes, memory, being, belonging, and community care. Visitors are invited to witness, touch, and add to the natural materials on the altar excavated from sites near Berlin connected to histories of enclosure, containment, and incarceration.

Katherine “Kat” Cheairs is an interdisciplinary artist, arts administrator, curator, educator, and researcher. Kat founded the Makeda School for Art, Media, and Humanities, an alternative educational and speculative learning space drawing from progressive education and Black feminist instructional pedagogies. Kat frequently collaborates on archival and video-based projects that intersect with AIDS, art, and activism. Kat is pursuing a doctorate in art and art education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Their research focuses on Black women art educators’ pedagogy and practice through the lens of Black feminist onto-epistemology, Black studies, feminist pedagogy, queer theory, and affect studies. Kat serves on the board of Visual AIDS. Kat has presented on panels at the Tribeca Film Institute, Pratt Institute, The New School, NYU, Vassar College, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Poster House, BAM, The Aperture Foundation, Whitney Museum of American Art, and UnionDocs.

HIV and the Colonial Present

Sat, 13.9.25, 6.00 pm

Lecture Performance

How are the history and present of the epidemic entangled with colonial violence? Jorge Bordello’s THIS IS NOT A CURE brings a critique of unequal access to HIV treatment into public space. Madi Awadalla’s lecture-performance Where Does Your AIDS Come From? explores epidemic origin myths and the bodies caught in between. The DJ set by Mad Kate attunes to how sound carries histories of power and resistance.

The night begins at 18:00 with Jorge Bordello’s THIS IS NOT A CURE, a performance critiquing unequal access to HIV treatment. Living with HIV, Bordello takes an ART pill and writes again and again, “This is not a cure,” until the chalk is spent and the boards are filled. Reciting economic data tied to antiretrovirals, he exposes a paradox: these drugs sustain life but offer no cure, revealing the everyday realities of HIV, the profit-driven structures of the pharmaceutical industry, and the gap between medical progress and social justice. Chalk’s fragility and erasure embody the ongoing struggle for a true cure.

Madi Awadalla’s „Where Does Your AIDS Come From?“ is a lecture performance on epidemic origin myths, colonial afterlives, and the bodies caught in between. Framed as a personal and political excavation, it weaves medical archives, migration interviews, and intimate encounters to probe a deceptively simple question often posed to people living with HIV: How did you get it? Writer and transdisciplinary artist Ahmed „Madi“ Awadalla works across performance, storytelling, and writing to engage public health, sexual politics, displacement, and the afterlives of colonialism.

From 20:30, Mad Kate’s DJ set attunes to how sound carries histories of power and resistance. Mad Kate is not a self made person; there are many shes, hes, theys inside of them, making them, recreating them. They are dedicated to staying with the struggles which are borne through and out of lived experiences on their own body and staying with complicated alleyships which are not. Mad Kate believes that queer is not just who we fck, how we dress and how we drag but how we resolve conflict, position our bodies, show up as allies, language our desires and co-regulate with our environments. The process of queering runs through their carework, heartwork, and artwork.

Huren in Action, Minds in Reaktion

Sat, 4.10.25, 6.00 pm

An event with activists and experts about the lived realities of sex workers in the context of HIV, accompanied by the screening of Ruins: Chronicle of an HIV Witch-Hunt (2013, Zoe Mavroudi), a documentary about the criminalization of HIV-positive women in Greece.

Panel discussion (from 6:30 PM)

Language: English & Spanish

Moderated by Pascale Espinosa & Hanna Schaich, this event brings together activists, sex workers, and artists to talk openly about the lived realities of sex workers in the context of HIV — centering voices too often silenced.

Amanita Calderón Cifuentes – Colombian microbiologist, sex worker, and HIV activist with over 20 years of research and advocacy. She has worked extensively in sexual and reproductive health, including HIV, Mpox, and the intersections of SOGIESC, migration, race, and drug use. As HIV Research & Advocacy Officer at TGEU and NGO Delegate to UNAIDS, she combines scientific expertise and lived experience to advance policy reform, combat stigma, and ensure at-risk trans and sex worker communities are represented in decision-making at global and European levels.

Giovanna Rincon – Trans, feminist, and HIV/AIDS activist, and founder of Acceptess-T in France. Born in Bogotá, she overcame poverty and early marginalization to create networks of solidarity for trans migrant women and sex workers. Giovanna led the launch of France’s first trans-specific housing program, helped establish the FAST emergency fund for trans people, and co-leads research-action projects documenting trans life trajectories. She also serves on boards including Sidaction and COREVIH Île-de-France Nord, improving healthcare access for trans people living with HIV. In 2025, she was awarded the Senate Medal of Honor for her extraordinary commitment to justice, care, and visibility.

Naya de Souza – Multidisciplinary artist working through alter-egos like Bundaskanzlerin. Her practice moves between performance, comedy, and online critique, exposing exclusion and stigma. Her art highlights how migration, bodies, and sexuality intersect with systems of power.

Frau Lexi Dark – Berlin-based performer and dominatrix whose performances explore power, desire, and transformation. Through her persona The Dark Frau, she uses performance to question norms around gender, sexuality, and visibility.

Film screening (from 8 PM): RUINS: Chronicle of an HIV witch-hunt

Language: Greek & English | Subtitles: English

At the director’s request, the film screening fee will be dedicated to supporting Steps Greece.

Α documentary about a shocking case of HIV criminalization in Greece. The story of the persecution of HIV-positive women who were detained by the Hellenic Police, forcibly tested, charged with a felony, imprisoned and publicly exposed, when their mug shots and personal data were published in the media in the run-up to the country’s 2012 national elections.

Directed by Zoe Mavroudi. Zoe Mavroudi is a writer, director and performer living and working in Athens.

Abya Yala+: Cinematic Perspectives from Colombia, Chile, Brazil, and Beyond

Sa, 18.10.25, 17:00 Uhr

Filmscreening: Spanish + English (with English subtitles)

Screening films from across Latin America, Abya Yala+ challenges the Global North’s dominance in HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. The selected documentaries, shorts, and features offer powerful insights into the political and emotional landscapes of HIV – past and present. A post-screening conversation with the filmmakers will explore memory, stigma, and the current conditions of HIV-related art and activism.

Siemprevivas: Memorias del SIDA en Chile (Everlastings: Memories of AIDS in Chile)


Director: Víctor Hugo Robles

Bio: Known as “El Che de los Gays,” Víctor Hugo is a Chilean community journalist and queer activist. A pioneer of artivism since the 1990s, he co-founded MOVILH Histórico, edited VIVOPOSITIVO, co-directed Las Locas del 73, and hosts the radio show Siempre Viva en Vivo, exploring gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS.

El VIH se enamoró de mí (HIV Fell in Love With Me)


Directors: Mariana Iacono & Juan de la Mar

Bio:
 Mariana Iacono — Feminist, social worker, and media activist making life with HIV visible for 20 years, centering pleasure, motherhood, and gender.
 Juan de la Mar — Lawyer and artist whose short De Gris a POSITHIVO reached 52 international film festivals. His performances La Dolorosa and La Unción merge art, healing, and activism.

Os Primeiros Soldados (The First Fallen)


Director: Rodrigo de Oliveira


Bio: Queer Brazilian director, screenwriter, and editor. A Brazilian Academy Award winner for All Paulos in the World(2018), Rodrigo has also directed The Vulgar Hours (2011), Tybalt Dead, Romeo in Exile (2015), and All This Water(2023). The First Fallen (2021) is his fourth feature — a powerful reflection on resilience and love amid the early HIV crisis.

Artist Talk mit Ivan L. Munuera

Sat, 18.10.25, 3.30 pm

Join curators Max Schnepf and Pascale Espinosa for an intimate walkthrough of the exhibition, tracing currents of desire, memory, and politics — with a special focus on the work of Ivan L. Munuera, who will also be present.

Ivan L. Munuera (with V. Rotie and P. Saiz) PrEP Bread, 2023 Installation – table, twenty-eight prints, photos, PrEP medication, and bread sculpture.

PrEP Bread maps the chemical and political networks that shape our bodies. PrEP—an HIV prevention therapy—links biology and geography: a single slice of bread taken with the drug spans continents, connecting laboratories in California, cornfields in Argentina, gas from Eastern Europe, lithium from the Atacama Desert, oil from Kazakhstan or Libya, flour from Navarra, latex from Thailand, and lubricant from Almería.

Developed for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, PrEP Bread unfolds as a visual research project exploring the global cartographies of health, technology, and desire.

Ivan L. Munuera is a scholar, critic, and curator whose work investigates the intersections of culture, politics, and bodily practices. Currently Assistant Professor at Bard College, Munuera has presented projects at the Museo Reina Sofía, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Fundació Suñol, Ludwig Museum, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Viral Memories

Pandemien erinnern – über HIV, COVID-19 und Mpox

Fri, 24.10.25, 5.00 pm

What does HIV/AIDS have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and recent outbreaks of Mpox? In this conversation, Jaime Garcia-Iglesias (University of Edinburgh) and Max Schnepf (Freie Universität Berlin) approach pandemics not as isolated events but as interwoven histories. Drawing on their social science research, they explore how lived experiences, memories, and affects connect diseases that may appear temporally and epidemiologically distinct.

Together, they reflect on questions of memory, privilege, and biomedical futurity: Who has the capacity to remember or the privilege to forget past pandemics? How do different generations of gay men recall HIV in the aftermath of COVID-19? And how do advances in HIV treatment and prevention shape how we imagine both pasts and futures?

Jaime Garcia-Iglesias is Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. He is a social scientist working on viral lives, particularly HIV, COVID and Mpox. His work spans sociology, humanities, and public health and has covered the role of memory in gay men’s experiences of COVID-19, the use of dating apps during COVID-19 for improved wellbeing, and community responses to the mpox outbreak. He is the author of The Eroticising of HIV: Viral Fantasies (Palgrave, 2022) and lead editor of Viral Times: Reflections on the COVID-19 and HIV Pandemics (Routledge, 2024).

Max Schnepf is a cultural anthropologist at Freie Universität Berlin, working at the intersection of medical anthropology, queer studies, and affect theory. In their doctoral research, Max investigates the effects and affects of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), a drug used to prevent HIV. Max’s engagement with HIV prevention and sexual cultures spans Germany, Colombia, and Australia, tracing the connections between public health, the arts, and activism. Their writing has been published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, and Feminist Anthropology. Max is one of the curators of VIRAL INTIMACIES.

Assembly for Care

Sa, 8.11.25, 18:00 Uhr

Performance, Panel discussion

The night starts with ConTatto. ConTatto is a performance that explores intimacy through the love story of two men, one of whom became disabled following a spinal stroke. The work invites reflection on how love and care manifest through the body and within shared space, suggesting that intimacy is not merely a private experience, but a universal language of relation, attention, and presence. The choreography takes shape from the archetypes of “postures of love,” unfolding as a dance of slowness — suspended between breath and silence, attuned to the smallest details. Through a process of embodied research, gestures of intimacy — holding and being held, leaning, offering, and receiving — are transformed into archetypal forms, generating a poetic, profound, and shared resonance that conveys the essence of care and human connection. At the heart of ConTatto lies a radical slowing down. Stillness and slowness become perceptive tools, allowing the performance to unfold as a sensitive field — open to contemplation and deep listening. Within this suspended and intimate space, the audience is invited to explore their own emotional landscape, to encounter their personal perceptions of intimacy, care, and love. A central element of the work is the desire to deconstruct visual and spatial hierarchies. The audience sits on the floor, always at the performers’ eye level. ConTatto is an intimate, porous, living space — where every gesture becomes a love letter, every breath a caress. An invitation for those who witness to turn inward, to sense the echoes of their own tenderness, distance, and desire. In its silence, the audience is invited to listen to themselves —to feel where love resides within their own bodies, and how closeness and care might take shape anew.

Choreography: Federica Dauri

Dramaturgy: Hanna Schaich

Performers: Luca Della Corte, Alain Nouchy

With the support of: Centro di Residenza della Toscana (ArmuniaCapoTrave/Kilowatt) Comune di Sansepolcro

Production Residency: Carrozzerie | n.o.t.

DANCE ON TOUR project by Tanzquartier Wien in cooperation with the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.

The panel discussion “Assembly for Care: HIV Justice Today”, moderated by Madi Awadalla and part of the Viral Intimacies public programme id conceived as a community gathering. The event addresses the politics of care with a focus on HIV justice and solidarity practices, bringing together service providers, artists, activists, and community members working at the intersections of sexual health, harm reduction, nightlife, and community care. Artistic contributions and performances will accompany the conversation.

Speakers

Motta / Epidemi.c

Based in Berlin and born in Bogotá, Motta is a member of the LoveLazers collective, dedicated to community support and the fight against HIV stigma. They are also a children’s rights and animal liberation activist, continuously exploring deidentification as a political practice.

Carolina Espinoza

A Latinx trans activist and community organizer, Carolina has been advocating for trans rights for over a decade. She currently works in awareness and care roles within Berlin’s sex-positive party scene, where she promotes safer spaces and harm reduction practices.

Mati Klitgård

Mati is a researcher, facilitator, and community organizer based in Berlin. They hold a PhD in Gender Studies and write on queer (counter)cultures, care and intimacy, queer ecologies, and political theory. In 2022 they founded the Gay Consent Lab, an initiative exploring consent, care, and pleasure as well as violence and loneliness through workshops and community events on queer sex cultures and structural oppression.

Artist Talk with Manuela Solano

Fri, 14.11.25, 7.00 pm

Moderated by Samuel Perea-Díaz

Since 2024, Manuela Solano has been producing a series of paintings on paper titled Blind, Transgender and Wild. She began this work as an attempt to produce paintings that were more playful and immediate. This approach has resulted in a series of paintings that reference the artist’s day-to-day experiences in Berlin nightlife, the art world, and her interactions with men using humorous touches throughout. With these works, Solano communicates what it’s like to socially navigate overlapping states of exception while still trying to have a good time. In the exhibition Viral Intimacies, the painting Wanna Party? (2024), part of the series Blind, Transgender and Wild, is presented.

“Sometimes I am sitting at a bar or waiting in line for the toilets and a stranger will ask me if I’m really blind, as though they find it hard to believe that a blind person could really be out partying on her own. They ask me why I have scars all over my body. They ask if I have a dick or a pussy. Or they ask me if I’m blind from birth or if I became blind, which leads to them to ask how I became blind, as though such an obviously tragic event was an acceptable topic for small talk. And it’s not that I want to hide my past—but I don’t want to talk about serious things when I’m trying to have fun, much less have to engage in a conversation about my HIV status with people who, more often than not, don’t even know what it means for one’s viral load to be undetectable. And because it baffles me that complete strangers don’t see anything inappropriate in trying to make me put such intimate matters on display to satisfy their curiosity.” ─ Manuela Solano

Manuela Solano (b. 1987 in Mexico City, MX) graduated in 2012 from the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking in Mexico City, after an academic stay at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. In 2014, she lost her sight due to complications from an HIV-related infection. Her practice explores identity, memory and humor. The artist’s work has been shown in numerous institutional exhibitions worldwide. Her main solo shows have taken place at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2022), Pivô, São Paulo (2021), Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2021), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018) and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Henie Onstad Art Center (2022), Palais de Tokyo (2019), New Museum (2018) and Museo Universitario del Chopo (2014). Her work has recently entered the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Manuela lives and works in Berlin.

This event is a collaboration with a Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin seminar „Artistic Responses to HIV/AIDS“ by Samuel Perea-Díaz, supported by HU Berlin Perspectives and the Office for Knowledge Exchange with Society. This activity is part of the “Proyecto I+D (PID2024-155474NB-I00) Affective Processes in Collective Artistic Practices: Between Agency and Experiential Knowledge (MICIU)”.

Archiving HIV/AIDS

Sat, 15.11.25, 1.00–9.00 pm

Performance, Talk, Film screening

Moderated by Samuel Perea-Díaz

The event explores artistic approaches and research to HIV/AIDS as archival practices, featuring a performance by Benny Nemer, talks by David Aaron Swartz and Siân Cook, and an artist talk with filmmaker Carla Simón, and the screening of her film “Estiu 1993” (Summer 1993), a personal film reflecting on loss, memory, and the AIDS a child´s perspective.

13:00-14:00 

PERFORMANCE

“Several Favourable Bodies” is a performance and accompanying video that traces the unfolding of Benny Nemer’s research into the strange fate of the postcard collection of French photographer and author Hervé Guibert (1955-1991). In search of an appropriate and meaningful aesthetics for his artistic engagement with AIDS histories, Nemer’s performance activates queer methods, participatory research techniques, and a process that privileges the formation of transhistorical bonds of kinship.

Benny Nemer (@benny_nemer) is a Montreal-born artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. His multidisciplinary practice often traces the affective contours of love and longing while facilitating bonds of kinship between his audience, figures from history, and himself, taking form through audio work, performance, participatory actions, epistolary writing, and flower arranging. Benny is currently a postdoctoral researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, where he is pursuing research into queer kinship, postcards as artistic medium, and the archive of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert. www.nemer.be

14:00-15:00 Break

15:00-16:30

Archival Practices in Berlin and the UK’s HIV/AIDS Visual Culture

Talk: Archiving HIV/AIDS: Introduction, Berlin Spotlight, and Research Findings, by David Aaron Swartz

“Archiving HIV/AIDS: Introduction, Berlin Spotlight, and Research Findings” will be a Talk and multi-media Presentation by David Aaron Swartz, who will be sharing about his past few years of intensive research around an orbit of topics including queer club culture, HIV/AIDS activism, cultural responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and public educational campaigns. He will provide an overview of archival resources and materials, including a particular local focus centered around his personal experiences navigating the rich archival landscape within Berlin.

David Aaron Swartz (IG: @daswartzy) has been HIV+ since June 2010. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, studied Sociology at The University of Colorado at Boulder, and then spent a decade living back in Los Angeles before moving to Berlin in 2015. He comes from a background of over two decades working across the music industry (most significantly as an artist manager). Over the past two years since stepping away from working directly in the music industry, David has been engaged in continuing education (e.g. courses at NODE Academy for Curatorial Studies and the recent completion of a Post-Graduate Certificate of Higher Education from the SAE Institute for Creative Media Education) and has been involved a dedicated practice of independent research, guest curation, and the development of an archive focused on contemporary queer club culture.

https://linktr.ee/daswartzy || www.queerclubculture.com || www.davidaaronswartz.com

Talk: Take Care (of that archive) by Siân Cook

“Take Care (of that archive)” It is important that graphic ephemera is included as part of the HIV and AIDS visual culture legacy. The materials produced, from local activist organisations to regional health authorities, help build a more complete picture of the epidemic. These tangible visual reminders, combined with lived experience, bear witness to how we attempted to inform and look after our friends and communities, especially during pre-digital times. ‘Take Care’ is a phrase that can be applied in different ways to HIV transmission, people living with HIV, but also archival practice itself.

Siân Cook is a graphic designer and Senior Lecturer in Graphic and Media Design at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She has been involved with UK HIV and AIDS organisations for over 30 years and has volunteered and designed for Terrence Higgins Trust, Red Hot AIDS, National AIDS Trust, the National HIV Story Trust and Positively UK. She helped create numerous campaigns for GMFA (originally Gay Men Fighting AIDS) throughout the 2000s and 2010s and was on their Board of Directors.

Siân began collecting examples of UK HIV and AIDS graphic ephemera in the 90s and has built an online archive to make this material more widely available:

http://www.hivgraphiccommunication.com

16:30-17:30 Break

17:30

ARTIST TALK

by filmmaker Carla Simón

Summer 1993 is the first feature film of filmmaker Carla Simon (Barcelona *1986). The film was first opened on the 11th of February 2017 in Berlin, which was enthusiastically received, as it also was at the many presentations at international film festivals. Summer 1993 (2017) was her autobiographical debut. It premiered at the 2017 Berlinale, where it won the Best Film Award and the Grand Jury Prize of the Generation Kplus section. The film has received more than 30 awards worldwide and earned her the Goya Award for Best New Director, in addition to being selected to represent Spain at the Oscars. Simón also received the Women in Motion Emerging Talent Award at Cannes in 2018.

Carla Simón (born 1986) is a film writer and director raised in a small Catalan village. Part of an extensive family that is a bottomless pit of stories, she decided to make films. Graduated in Audiovisual Communication in Barcelona, Carla got a scholarship to complete her MA at the London Film School. Summer 1993 (2017) is her autobiographical debut. It won the Best First Feature Award and the Generation Kplus Grand Prix at the Berlinale, along with three Goya awards, including Best New Director. The film represented Spain at the 2018 Oscar Academy Awards, got the Discovery nomination at the European Film Awards and it gave Carla the Kering emerging Women in Motion award in Cannes. In 2022, Simón released her last short film Letter to my mother for my son, a Miu Miu tale premiered at Giornate degli Autori in the 79th Venice International Film Festival. Her second feature film, Alcarràs (2022) won the precious Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It was selected in more than 90 international film festivals and was sold to more than 35 territories. It also represented Spain at the 2023 Oscar Academy Awards, it got three nominations at the European Film Awards and it won six Gaudí awards from the Catalan Cinema Academy. In 2023, Carla got the Spanish National Cinematography Award. Romería, Simón’s third feature film, will have its world premiere in the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

19:00

FILM SCREENING

Summer 1993, original language (Catalan) with English subtitles (96 minutes)

Synopsis:

In the summer 1993, following the death of her parents, six years old Frida moved from Barcelona to the Catalan province to live with her aunt and uncle, who are now her new legal guardians. The country life is a challenge for Frida – time passes differently in her new home and the nature that surrounds her is mysterious and strange. She now has a little sister for whom she has to take care of and has to deal with new feelings, such as jealousy. Often, Frida is naively convinced that running away would be the best solution to her problems. Yet, the family does what it can to achieve a fragile new balance and bring normality to their life. Occasional family outings to a local fiesta or a swimming pool, cook-ing or listening to jazz in the garden bring them moments of happiness. Slowly, Frida realizes that she is there to stay and has to adapt to the new environment. Before the season is over, she has to cope with her emotions and her parents have to learn to love her as their own daughter.

*With the support of AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE)

Viral Intimacies x Young Intimacies: Traces of Possible Futures

Sun, 16.11.25, 3.00–10.00 pm

Guided Tour, Film screenings, Talk, DJ set

The last act of Viral Intimacies gives space to voices weaved together by the exhibition project through different modes of encounters: students who came in contact with the topic of HIV/AIDS and Viral Intimacies through artistic outreach project will discuss their perspectives with artists from the exhibition and present their artistic interventions in form of sculptures, podcasts, posters and short films. While Los Amarillos who kicked off the exhibition with their performance Manifesto Amarillo will share about their 2 month journey through Europe in a conversation. The evening and exhibition project will be concluded with a final dance during a DJ Set by ½ of Los Amarillos Camilo Acosta aka LadyHunter.

15h: Fokus Tour

During the Young Intimacies Focus Tour, students from the Evangelische Schule Berlin-Zentrum invite visitors to learn about their projects and perspectives on the topic of HIV/AIDS, which they developed in relation to the artistic positions presented in the exhibition. During the tour, the students engage in conversation with artists featured in the exhibition.

The tour will be given in German, conversations with artists in English (whisper translation into German/English/Spanish available).

With: Hanna Schaich, Los Amarillos, Pascal Espinosa, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo and students of Evangelische Schule Berlin-Zentrum.

17h: Screening

The screening will feature short films from the holiday workshop and school project days.

18h: Artists Talk

Los Amarillos return to Berlin for the final day of the exhibition to share their experiences from the Frontera Amarilla project. After kicking off at the opening of Viral Intimacies, Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta encountered stories, bodies, and realities of people living with HIV+ and in Latin American migration during their European tour. In conversation with Pascale Espinosa and Elisabeth Krämer.

19h: DJ Set

Camilo Acosta aka LadyHunter

YOUNG INTIMACIES was an interdisciplinary artistic outreach project that was part of the Viral Intimacies exhibition at nGbK Berlin. It was aimed at young people between the ages of 14 and 18 and pursued the goal of using artistic means to open up spaces in which young people could critically, creatively, and independently engage with the topics of HIV/AIDS, sexuality, health, and social exclusion.

The project comprised eight school project days with the Max Beckmann Secondary School and the Evangelische Schule Berlin-Zentrum, as well as a film workshop for queer young people during the fall break with Trialog Jugendhilfe GmbH – Bereich Queer Leben und Queerdom – Queeres Jugendzentrum Berlin-Mitte.

Concept & direction: Madi Awadalla, Pascale Espinosa, Christina Harles

Project coordination: Elisabeth Krämer

The project was funded by the Berlin Project Fund for Cultural Education.