The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2025 by presenting 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.
Meet Us Where We’re At… will feature newly commissioned videos by Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre & Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico).
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.
As this is a program centering harm reduction, it will contain depictions of sexual activity and drug use.
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.
To mark World AIDS Day, CCS Bard presents a public program series honoring the ongoing struggle against HIV and AIDS, coordinated by CCS Bard students Luis Juárez (CCS ‘27) and Gladys Lou (CCS ‘26).
Looping presentations of Meet Us Where We’re At… (Run time = 55:52)
Friday, December 5th from 11:00am-5:00pm
Friday, December 12th from 11:00am-1:00pm & 2:00pm-5:00pm
Location: CCS Bard Classroom 102
If you are interested in viewing the trailer of the video, you can find it here.
For video synopses and bios please see here.
Additional Programming:
Pages of Remembrance: A Tribute to World AIDS Day
Curated by Luis Juárez
On view in the CCS Bard Library (rear display wall) from December 5 - 19
Pages of Remembrance offers a selection of books, gathered from the holdings of the CCS Bard Library and, inviting viewers to engage with a landscape of knowledge shaped by decades of resistance, imagination, and collective care. The titles explore renewed possibilities: they envision alternative futures, trace the historical battles against AIDS, and acknowledge the transformative power of sexual liberation. Spanning photography, critical theory, art history, activism, biography, and politics, this constellation of works encourages us to imagine a world where sexual diversity is understood as an essential and creative force.