AFTERWORDS: entanglement - screening of Meet Us Where We’re At

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public.

The fourth event in the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series of public programs will feature a screening of Meet Us Where We’re At presented by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2025.

“Entanglement” is a keyword for studying how human existence is bound up with the more-than-human world, and a call to imagine the web of relations that bind us to each other and the world across space and time. To recognize one’s entanglement complicates one’s sense of agency; to embrace one’s entanglement is to resist the notion of critical distance or objectivity. How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements? How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency? What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?

AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.

Curated by CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and ICPP Director Noémie Solomon.

Meet Us Where We’re At features six new, short videos that forefront the experiences of drug users and harm reduction practices as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis. The total runtime is one hour.

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.

Meet Us Where We’re At will feature newly commissioned short videos by artists working across the world: Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico).

The artists in this program were selected by a jury of artists/community workers including Eva Dewa Masyitha, Heather Edney, charles ryan long, and Leo Herrera.

About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at Wesleyan University.