VideoVirus by AA Bronson + General Idea. Commissioned by CIRCA, 2021, photo: Anna Bauer
VideoVirus von General Idea + AA Bronson
On the occasion of World AIDS day on 1 December 2023, the Gropius Bau and CIRCA present VideoVirus, a powerful video work by AA Bronson + General Idea. From 27 November to 3 December VideoVirus will screen every hour at 23 minutes past the hour on a 104 square-metre screen on Berlin’s iconic Ku’damm. With this intervention, AA Bronson, CIRCA and the Gropius Bau want to raise awareness for a still-current crisis. Furthermore, a 10 second version of the video will be shown on around 100 digital advertisement screens, spreading the message across the city.
“When AIDS arrived, it decimated the queer population. Most of my friends died during the late eighties and early 90s. And it brought into the open an avalanche of sometimes violent homophobia. On December 1, but indeed on every day, I mourn the loss of so many very special people.”
— AA Bronson
VideoVirus draws inspiration from General Idea’s historic Imagevirus, which in the late-1980s called attention to the AIDS epidemic by reappropriating Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE logo. The artwork comes to life in a hypnotic video animation that spreads a symbol of their activist message. The film will be running every hour on a Limes LED screen in Berlin on Kurfürstendamm 227.
General Idea’s AIDS pieces use strategies of branding and infrastructures of image circulation to bring visibility to HIV and AIDS. First conceived in 1987, at a time when disinformation, fear and neglect dominated the debate, the works subverted the design of Robert Indiana’s wildly popular LOVE sculptures (since 1966) to shed light on the taboos and urgencies surrounding the issue. Existing as posters, wallpapers, paintings, multiples and sculptures, the AIDS lettering became a logo that spread through General Idea’s exhibitions and interventions in public space.