World AIDS Day at The Broad: This is Not An AIDS Advertisement

https://www.thebroad.org/events/world-aids-day-not-aids-advertisement-screening-and-talk

The Broad’s 2019 World AIDS Day event, which is hosted and co-organized by West Hollywood's poet laureate, Steven Reigns, takes as its starting point a screening of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s short video, This is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987, Super 8 transferred to video, 10 min). Following the screening, Reigns, along with award-winning author Bernard Cooper, writer, musician, and choreographer Brontez Purnell, and acclaimed writer and producer, Jacob Tobia, will respond to Julien’s film, speak to how HIV and AIDS have impacted their lives personally, and present examples of their own work. 

In its stylish and erotic imagery, This is Not an AIDS Advertisement might be seen as having been a riposte to the Puritanism of the mid-1980s' "moral panic" around AIDS. A two-part video, the first part deals with lyrical images of death and loss while the second part is more joyful, assertive, and celebratory, accompanied by a funk-heavy soundtrack and politically charged poetry. Hot pink tinting makes men the objects of desire.

Since opening its doors in 2015, The Broad has presented annual programming for World AIDS Day to commemorate the many who have lost their lives to the pandemic, to recognize the many still living with HIV/AIDS, and to acknowledge that, globally speaking, the AIDS the crisis is not over.

At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, artists became activist and activism grew into an art form. Prime examples of this include Broad collection artists Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz (both of whom died of AIDS-related complications), as well as Glenn Ligon and Jenny Holzer, who continue to use their artistic voices to highlight the need for public awareness on the subject.