World AIDS Day

“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

On the occasion of World AIDS day on 1 December 2023, the Gropius Bau and CIRCA present VideoVirus, a powerful 3 minute-long digital animation by AA Bronson and 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 – one of the largest screens in Berlin. 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. 

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 (opposite Kranzler Eck, on the corner of Joachimsthaler Straße).

A preview of VideoVirus can be seen here.

For interviews with AA Bronson please contact presse@gropiusbau.de.

For statements about the campaign and initiative, please contact Birgit Schapow at schapow@gropiusbau.de.

Until 14 January the Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive retrospective of General Idea in Germany. Charting their collaborative and genre-bending explorations of the interrelations between gender, sexuality, mass media, social inequality, protest, consumer culture, art world economies and the public sphere, the exhibition has been developed in close conversation with Berlin-based founding member AA Bronson. 

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.

Artist and General Idea’s founding member AA Bronson explains:

“General Idea first developed the concept of viral images in the early 1970s. 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. General Idea’s VideoVirus replicates the spread of HIV and expands General Idea’s signature theme of ‘image as virus’ for a global audience.”

VideoVirus screened for the first time in 2021 on LED screens in the city centres of London, Seoul, Milan, New York and Tokyo.  

General Idea, a collaboration between AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, began in Toronto in 1969. The group’s transgressive concepts and provocative imagery challenged social power structures and traditional modes of artistic creation in ever-shifting ways until Partz and Zontal’s untimely deaths from AIDS-related causes in 1994.