Marking 40 years since the first cases of HIV were recorded, the film will be screened on billboards across the world through the month of December
2021 marks 40 years since the first five cases of what would later became known as Aids were recorded. The decades since that fateful summer in 1981 have brought about confusion, stigma, rage, and the deaths of 36 million people around the world. Today, revolutionary antiretroviral therapies mean that HIV-positive people are able to live long and healthy lives – though with many unable to access such lifesaving treatments, and nearly 1.5 million new HIV infections and 680,000 deaths each year, the Aids epidemic is far from over.
To mark World Aids Day, Circa is debuting a powerful new film by AA Bronson titled VideoVirus, which will be streamed across billboards in London, Milan, New York, Seoul, and Tokyo throughout December.
Based in Toronto and Berlin, AA Bronson is an artist, healer and curator, and the sole-surviving founder of disruptive art collective General Idea, which he started in Toronto in 1969 alongside Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. Sadly both Partz and Zontal died of Aids-related illness in 1994. Bronson’s new film for Circa pays tribute to the group’s mid-80s Imagevirus project, which reimagined Robert Indiana’s famous ‘Love’ logo with the Aids symbol, spreading it through cities in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, and exhibitions.
"General Idea first developed the concept of viral images in the early 1970s,” says Bronson. “In the mid-80s that work became prophetically and tragically true, with the appearance of the HIV virus. In 1987 we exhibited our first Aids painting and papered lower Manhattan with Aids posters in the hope of making the image indeed viral. 35 years later, and marking the 40th anniversary of Aids first being recorded, I am honoured to join the Circa platform with this reimagined VideoVirus.”
The VideoVirus film will be shown this evening at 20.21pm across the Piccadilly Lights in London and also globally in Seoul, Coex K-Pop Square, Melbourne, Fed Square, Milan, Luxottica, Piazzale Cadorna, New York Luxottica, Times Square and Tokyo, Yunika Vision.