AA Bronson + General Idea, Imagevirus

Launching World AIDS Day, 1 Dec 2021, CIRCA presents VideoVirus, a powerful new film by AA Bronson and General Idea. Reimagining their historic Imagevirus for a global audience, the artwork comes to life in a hypnotic video animation that virally transmits their activist message across billboards in London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Seoul & Tokyo. 

Throughout December, CIRCA is proud to partner with UNAIDS and Terrence Higgins Trust to mark 40 years since the disease was first recorded in 1981. A new work by AA Bronson, the sole surviving member of the General Idea art group, draws inspiration from the viral intentions of Imagevirus, which in the mid-1980s spread consciousness of the epidemic by reappropriating Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE logo, virally transmitting the AIDS symbol through cities in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, and exhibitions. 

From Imagevirus’ original intention of rendering visible an ignored crisis, today’s VideoVirus colourfully heralds our progress toward the eradication of AIDS, with CIRCA’s global presentation amplifying the commitment by international health organisations to achieve zero new HIV transmissions by 2030. 

Artist, healer and curator 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. Thirty-five years later, and marking the 40th anniversary of AIDS first being recorded, I am honoured to join the CIRCA platform with this reimagined ‘VideoVirus.’ General Idea’s VideoVirus replicates the spread of HIV to the four corners of the world; it expands General Idea’s signature theme of ‘image as virus’ for a global audience.

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.

DECEMBER PROGRAMME
VideoVirus by AA Bronson + General Idea
1 – 31 December, CIRCA 20:21

20:21 BST ➳ London, Piccadilly Lights
20:21 KST ➳ Seoul, COEX K-Pop Square
20:21 CET ➳ Milan, Cadorna Square, EssilorLuxottica
20:21 EST ➳ New York, Luxottica, Times Square
09:00 JST ➳ Tokyo, Yunika Vision, Shinjuku

Born 1946, in Vancouver, Canada, AA Bronson currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Since 1995, he has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations of artists. From 2004 to 2010, he was the Director of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York, founding the annual NY Art Book Fair in 2005. In 2009 he co-founded the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 2013 he was the founding Director of Printed Matter‘s LA Art Book Fair. 

AA Bronson currently lives and works in Berlin. He co-founded the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969. The three artists worked and lived together until the deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994. Since then, Bronson has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations of artists. Since 1999, he has worked as a healer, an identity that he has also incorporated into his artwork. From 2004 to 2010, he was the Director of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York, founding the annual NY Art Book Fair in 2005. In 2009 he founded the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York, which he now co-directs. In 2013 he was the founding Director of Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair. He has taught at the University of California in Los Angeles, the University of Toronto, and the Yale School of Art.

 AA Bronson has received numerous awards, including: the AICA Award, AICA Netherlands, in 2014; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, in 2011, the Officer of the Order of Canada in 2008 and the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, Canada in 2002.

 Bronson’s artistic practice has long included elements of shamanism, although this tendency became more apparent only after the deaths from AIDS in 1994 of his collaborators Zontal and Partz. At the same time, as Bronson acknowledged: “The 60s obsession with Eastern religions, states of the ecstatic, and theories of radical living and working fit me perfectly. General Idea never presented itself as spiritual, but behind our corporate mask, we were the product of our generation.”
Bronson’s best-known project is perhaps his series of performative healing rituals and séances, Invocation of Queer Spirits (2008–2009), for which he collaborated with Toronto artist Peter Hobbs to stage spiritual experiences in five locations across North America; in Banff, Alberta, New Orleans, Louisiana, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Governor’s Island, New York, and Fire Island Pines, New York. Bronson has characterized this series of performances as “a hybrid between group therapy, ceremonial magic, a séance, a circle jerk, and a quilting bee.”