LUX is pleased to present a new series of screenings, texts and discussions curated by artist and writer Conal McStravick, considering what the history of radical and activist video practices can teach us about how to respond to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Picturing A Pandemic looks to the moving image archive to examine the ways that video as a practice, technology, and commons offers the tools for women, LGBTQIA people, people with chronic conditions and people of colour to stage liberations and survive crises, as collective and embodied activisms, in the past, present and future.

Picturing a Pandemic is organised by LUX in collaboration with Vtape. LUX is an international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them. Founded in 2002 as a charity and not-for-profit limited company, the organisation builds on a long lineage of predecessors (the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, London Video Arts and the Lux Centre) which stretch back to the 1960s.

In 1989, Vtape collaborated with Video Data Bank to distribute the historic three-part series VIDEO AGAINST AIDS, a provocative and inspiring counter-representation of the AIDS crisis. While the series is no longer available as a program, many of the individual titles from it are still in distribution. Contact Wanda Vanderstoop at Vtape (wandav@vtape.org) for more information.