Day With(out) Art 2025 Short Film Series: Meet Us Where We’re At

 
For Day With(out) Art 2025, Visual AIDS has organized Meet Us Where We’re At, a program of six videos that forefront the experiences of drug users and harm reduction practices as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis.

Commissioned videos by artists in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, and Vietnam journey across a range of spaces revealing the complexity of drug use. Several videos document the visible world of drugs—a harm reduction program in a Berlin park, a night out during Rio’s Carnival—while others reveal private, often hidden spaces where safety is found: bedrooms, underground clinics, and moments of connection between lovers.

Meet Us Where We’re At speaks not only to the variety of physical locations where contemporary harm reduction is practiced, but also to a broader shift: centering drug users as authors of their own experiences. Rooted in the philosophy of meeting people at their personal reality without judgment, the program affirms the full context of drug use—its pleasures, its risks, and its role in how people survive, care, and connect.

Harm reduction has long been central to the AIDS movement through practices like needle exchange and safe injection sites, and people who use drugs have been affected by HIV since the earliest days of the epidemic. This program brings their perspectives to the forefront, amplifying the voices of drug users as storytellers, cultural producers, and essential participants in the global response to HIV.

Meet Us Where We’re At will feature newly commissioned short videos by artists working across the world:

Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria)
Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam)
Gustavo Vinagre & Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal)
Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil)
Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany)
José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico)

The artists in this program were selected by a jury of artists/community workers including Eva Dewa Masyitha, Heather Edney, charles ryan long, and Leo Herrera.

Please note that this program contains content intended for mature audiences. Anyone under the age of 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

The museum is wheelchair accessible, and there will be a designated mobility assisted seating area in the front row.

If you have additional accommodation requests,
please email: [email protected]
 
This event is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, on view at the Jones Center through Jan 11 (Sun).
 

 
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

For more information on Visual AIDS and Day With(out) Art, visit: visualaids.org.