Both parts of “A Fire in My Belly” are made from video shot in Mexico, a country that Wojnarowicz found mesmerizing for its combination of vital popular culture and daily life lived shockingly close to the bone. The 13-minute video opens with a panning shot, taken from a moving car, of the streets of a Mexican town, interrupted by quick shots of newspaper headlines reporting violent crimes. These sequences are punctuated, very briefly, with a few other images: a suspended world globe; a cartoonish dancing puppet wearing a sombrero; a disembodied hand dropping coins.

Then three scenes of combat alternate repeatedly: a bullfight and a cockfight  each gruesome  and a masked and acrobatic wrestling match. Travelogue-ish sequences that follow  of a circus with performing animals and a visit to a Mesoamerican archaeological site with demonic-looking sculptures  go on too long (as does the wrestling), and the video ends abruptly when the dancing puppet is shot at with what looks like a pistol full of paint. If there is any overriding idea delivered in the video, it has to do with how violence-addicted people, and specifically men, are.

The seven-minute “excerpt” feels more packed and purposeful, and quite complete. The opening image, which will recur again and again, is of metal wheels turning, like some machine of fate. Then, interwoven and rapidly repeated, we see pairs, not necessarily juxtaposed, of related images: street beggars and armed police; Day of the Dead candy skulls and a painting of an Aztec human sacrifice; mummified bodies displaced from graves in a cemetery and an undisturbed tombstone being gently washed.

Certain images were evidently filmed in a studio: coins falling into a bandaged hand, and a hand held under splashing water; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, and a man’s lips being sewn shut. A short sequence of a man masturbating alternates with images of sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. The image of the crucifix with ants comes almost in the middle of all of this, between shots of bread being sewn and blood dripping into a bowl. At the end, images from the first video reappear  the puppet and the globe  both burning.

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.