Meet Us Where We’re At
Visual AIDS: A Day With(out) Art
Annually on World AIDS Day: Monday, December 1, 2025, 10am - 3pm
GOCA Project Space
Meet Us Where We’re At
2025 Visual AIDS: A Day With(out) Art
GOCA is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art. This is an annual program features new films, committed from artists around the world, reflecting on living with HIV today.
For Day With(out) Art 2025, Visual AIDS announces 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.
Featured Artists and Films for 2025:
Kenneth Idongesit Usoro, Voices of Resilience (Nigeria)
Hoàng Thái Anh, The Sister’s Journey (Vietnam)
Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto, The passion according to G.H.B. (Brazil/Portugal)
Camilo Tapia Flores, Realce (Highlight) (Chile/Brazil)
Camila Flores-Fernández, Ghost in the Park (Peru/Germany)
José Luis Cortés, ¿Porque tanto dalor? (Why So Much Pain?) (Puerto Rico)
World AIDS Day 2025
Mon, Dec 1st, 2025
GOCA Looped Screening
Mon, Dec 1st, 2025, 10am - 3pm
GOCA Project Space
*Total runtime: 1 hour
Info on the 2025 Films and Artists coming Fall 2025
About Visual AIDS
Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS is the only arts organization fully committed to raising aids awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums and publications - while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS. Visual AIDS is committed to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the aids movement.
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.
About A Day With(out) Art
In 1989, in response to the worsening AIDS crisis and coinciding with the World Health Organization’s second annual World AIDS Day on December 1, Visual AIDS organized the first Day Without Art. Each year, Visual AIDS has commissioned and distributed a video program for Day With(out) Art, coordinating screenings at over 100 venues around the world.