LOVE &
ONLINE
25.06.2026 — 30.06.2026
LOVE & ELEGY is an online program bringing together Jim Hubbard’s A Valentine for Nelson and Elegy in the Streets. Through distinct forms and scales, these two films open up questions of love, loss, memory, and the experience of being together.
Love and elegy are two forms of struggle that move at different rhythms yet coexist within queer culture.
A Valentine for Nelson is a brief and intimate reflection on the process of building a relationship. It unfolds like a diary and speaks like a love letter. Rather than treating love as an abstract ideal, the film approaches it as a space of relation shaped through everyday gestures, labor, and duration. Each image operates as a metaphor, presenting a relationship as something continuously under construction.
Elegy in the Streets, by contrast, traces a history of mourning and resistance shaped by the AIDS crisis. The film intertwines personal memory with collective action, bringing together recollections of filmmaker Roger Jacoby, who died of AIDS, and the emergence of ACT UP's political response to the epidemic. From candlelight vigils and the AIDS Quilt to Pride marches and increasingly militant demonstrations, the film charts the transformation of grief into collective action. Its silence is not merely an aesthetic choice but a condition of attention, inviting viewers into a direct encounter with the image itself.
By placing these works alongside one another, LOVE & ELEGY approaches love and elegy not as opposites, but as two distinct temporalities and modes of struggle that continually touch one another within queer experience. One turns toward the everyday work of building a relationship, while the other confronts loss and the political necessity of remembrance. Together, they offer a reflection on intimacy, mourning, and the forms of solidarity that emerge from both.
The program will be available online at chutecoop.com from June 25 to June 30.
ELEGY
Films:
Jim Hubbard
Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974. He made United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a feature length documentary on ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, which won Best Documentary at MIX Milano and Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBT Film Festival and has played at over 150 museums, universities and film festivals worldwide.
Sarah Schulman and he completed 187 interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project. One hundred and two of those interviews were on view in a 14-monitor installation at the Carpenter Center for the Arts, Harvard University as part of the exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, October 15 – December 23, 2009. A version with 114 interviews showed at the White Columns Gallery in New York, September 8 – October 23, 2010. He, along with James Wentzy, created a 9-part cable access television series based on the Project.
Among his 19 other films are Elegy in the Streets (1989), Two Marches (1991), The Dance (1992) and Memento Mori (1995). His films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been shown at the Warhol Museum, ICA Boston, the Harvard Film Archive, Tokyo University, der Zürcher Museen, mumok (Vienna), the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Torino and many other Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals. His film Memento Mori won the Ursula for Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1995.
He co-founded MIX - the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created the AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library. He curated the series Fever in the Archive: AIDS Activist Videotapes from the Royal S. Marks Collectionfor the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The 8-program series took place December 1-9, 2000. He also co-curated the series, Another Wave: Recent Global Queer Cinema at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, July and September 2006. In 2013-14, he curated an 8-program series of AIDS activist video from the collection of the New York Public Library to accompany their landmark exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism. In 2018, he received a grant from the Al Larvick Conservation Fund to digitize over 2 hours of his Lesbian & Gay Pride March and other Queer demonstration footage and Queer home movies.
Artist Websites:
Special Thanks
Jim Hubbard
N. Batuhan Pınarcıoğlu
