Description
A video about HIV cure research, extrapolating on the medical term ‘elite controllers’ — for people who have the ability to halt HIV disease progression naturally in their bodies without any ARV intervention. This two-segment video has a stop-motion, 1260 frame animation, redacting the Air Force from 1m30s of 1986’s TopGun theme video Danger Zone, layered seven times on itself; abutted against a conversation between Poz individuals about hope, futurity, post-humanism, and releasing to the void.
Bio
CANADA
Multidiscipline artist
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Black Duck Siding, Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada. They attended NSCAD and Concordia before returning to St. John’s to work as Programming Coordinator at Eastern Edge Gallery and later to Mohkinstsis/Calgary to work as the Director of TRUCK Gallery. Their work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres, performance art festivals and public galleries.
Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history as a sexual health educator, harm reduction worker and activist. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss.
Mikiki has worked as a high school Sex Educator, a Bathhouse Attendant, Drag Karaoke Hostess, in various capacities in the Gay Men’s Health and HIV response, in Harm Reduction Outreach and HIV testing all over Canada. Mikiki is currently producing a quarter century retrospective of their drag performance art this upcoming August 21-27 at The Rooms in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
