CURATORIAL TEXT (1)

I started working as a freelance curator on a voluntary basis for the ArtAids Foundation within the context of the International Aids Congress held in Bangkok, Thailand. Several international artists — including some widely known names such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Jef Geys, David Goldblatt and Shirana Shahbazi — were invited to produce an original print or poster to raise funds for the HIVNAT Foundation (a nonprofit research institute in Thailand supported by Australia, the Netherlands and Thailand). Everyone reacted very positively to this initiative. After being presented at the Queen’s Gallery (a mayor exhibition centre in Bangkok), the project travelled to several museums and cultural institutions in Europe. The success of the exhibition and the enthusiasm of the artists and medical teams involved convinced Han Nefkens and me to pursue this adventure further.

Belgian artist Leo Copers was invited to create a piece especially for the UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva. He presented a poetic installation with roses painted in contaminated blood but covered by precious golden boxes. Kofi Annan honoured us by being present at the opening of the exhibition. Later, Leo Copers became one of four foreign artists (along with Gerald Van Der Kaap, Otto Berchem and Erich Weiss) to take part in AIDS-related workshops in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Curated by Kate Chattiya and entitled More to Love, this exhibition project received a lot of attention in the press and local media and revealed the stigma that HIV/AIDS still carries in Thailand. The next project was organised in Barcelona, Spain, and brought together several younger artists who had a special relationship with the city. This exhibition, entitled On the Outside Looking In, was curated by Catalan art critic Miquel Bardagil. All the artists produced new and sometimes site-specific works. The ArtAids Foundation was also present at two editions of Benicàssim Festival […] and organised a video competition and announced the winner at the international Loop Festival in Barcelona. A new edition, with an international jury including Steve McQueen, is scheduled for 2011. […] To broaden our horizons, an exhibition was held during the Dakar Biennale in Senegal. Belgian curator Stef Van Bellingen selected both European and African artists to engage in a dialogue on the problem of HIV. Finally, American curator Lumi Tan, who received the H+F Grant, organised a wide range of activities in the city of Lille in France: exhibitions, performances, film screenings and conferences.

Our latest project, You Are Not Alone, which is hosted by the Fundació Joan Miró and will then travel on to MARCO in Vigo, is the logical continuation of these activities. Once again, contemporary artists are invited to create new works reflecting on the subject of AIDS. This is a multilayered exhibition bringing together different nationalities and several generations. As a curator, it is an honour to be able to continue my collaboration with the ArtAids Foundation because I have always believed that individual actions can bring about major change.

Hilde Teerlinck
[Excerpt from the text for the catalogue of the exhibition]

CURATORIAL TEXT (2)

Given the medical advances of recent years, people in developed countries no longer experience a diagnosis of HIV or AIDS as a “death sentence” as they did in the eighties and nineties. Now, with the appropriate medication, HIV-positive persons can carry on with their lives, barely affected by the virus. This is the situation from the medical point of view, but is it also the social reality? Unfortunately, in the rest of the world people with limited financial means continue to live under that old “sentence”.

Although beliefs and habits have evolved significantly over the past twenty years, we cannot claim that the substantial medical advances are currently reflected in the social situation of HIV-positive persons. The discrimination and stigmatisation that these people are subject to has by no means disappeared in contemporary societies. This is why it is important to highlight the problem of stigma, and to provide a space for reflection that offers alternative, positive visions of an illness that can affect anybody, directly or indirectly through relatives, friends and acquaintances.

In the first decade after the virus was discovered, many artists took action to denounce the social problems generated by misinformation, and to draw attention to the human reality of the illness. The first cases of AIDS were discovered on the West Coast of the United States in 1981, and North American artists proved to be the most prolific in terms of dealing with the issue of AIDS in the eighties and nineties. [...]AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study (1988-1989), organised by Group Material at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, was paradigmatic of the type of collaborative and discursive aesthetic developed over the years by this artists’ collective which had been founded in 1980. […]

When conceiving his installation Resource Room for this exhibition, Matthew Darbyshire decided to rethink the educational models that we are faced with at different points in our lives. This led him to draw inspiration from the exhibition Education and Democracy, the first part of the series AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study, in which a classroom offered an open platform for discussion. In a space inspired by a schoolroom, Darbyshire offers visitors the chance to discover a new way of reading a selection of posters produced by the Department of Public Health in England during the eighties, with the aim of preventing the spread of AIDS. What we are faced with is a series of aggressive slogans that are discriminatory in regards to social difference. Darbyshire draws attention to the way in which this type of advertising language, which has been used since the eighties, uses fear as a weapon in the fight to prevent AIDS. This fear has taken root in society, to such an extent that it has become one of the apparently natural, inherent elements of the idea that forms in people’s minds in regards to this virus and the illness.

Latifa Echakhch’s installation, Tkaf, also raises questions around the way in which the media and governmental institutions have handled HIV since it emerged in 1981, and how this may have affected the relationship between people who are HIV positive and those who aren’t. Tkaf is based on a nation-wide scandal that hit the French press in the eighties, with the revelation that, in the Spring of 1985, blood contaminated with the HIV virus had been knowingly given to haemophiliac patients, even though the test to detect the virus had been available for several months. The French population thus learnt about the virus in a context of panic and indignation.

From the outset, homosexuals have been considered to be the group at greatest risk of contamination, and homosexual men have been associated with infected blood. […] This association between homosexuality or bisexuality and AIDS is still deeply rooted in the mentalities of developed countries. It is also easily linked to homophobic attitudes, which are a major element of the stigmatisation of HIV-positive persons. In the countries of the former Soviet block, discrimination against the homosexual population was entrenched to the point that anti-homosexual legislation was passed in the Soviet Union, and it continues to re-emerge in certain ways, as is the case of Lithuania. […] In his video Restricted Sensation, against this background of stigmatisation and discrimination of the Lithuanian homosexual community, the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius seeks to explore the mechanisms of the intolerance that has increased in recent years and pervades Lithuanian society today. […]

In his installation Thai Village, Thai artist Sutee Kunavichayanont presents a scale model of a traditional village from his homeland. Although Thailand has been one of the pioneering countries in the fight against AIDS in South East Asia since 1991, strong social taboos in relation to the illness continue to persist in traditional Thai society. […]

A situation that frequently recurs in developing countries is the “silent” infection of one of the partners in a relationship when the other partner has engaged in extramarital sex. […] In her video Pasos (Steps), Lorena Zilleruelo takes up one of these stories through a narrative that is set to tango music. The intensity of the dance reveals the immensity of the feelings that must be faced by a woman who has been infected by her partner: not only the fear that the diagnosis entails, but also the death of the man she loves. […]

The installation Deadheading, by Otto Berchem, also offers a perspective of transformed time. In this case, flowers are cut from their stems and left to wither on the ground. The regular evolution of time stops, the nature of the flower changes, and it perishes. As the withered flowers pile up on the ground day after day in the course of the exhibition, Deadheading brings us face to face with the essence of the memento mori.

Another work that explores the constant tension between life and death is Nowhere, in which Christodoulos Panayiotou’s presents a study of the sky and its representation, through the mise en scene of an endless moment and its disappearance. For Nowhere, Panayiotou presents a performance in which two set painters employ themselves with almost dream-like slowness in painting a backdrop of a sky that seems to go on for ever. Once the performance is over, the sky is folded up, and only the memory of it remains. In this work, the artist’s vision of the illness is latent in the existential desire for eternity, which makes itself felt through the representation of the immensity of the sky.

In a play on the immensity of a monument that is familiar to everybody, Danh Vo has set himself the challenge of reproducing a life-size model of the Statue of Liberty. Aside from symbolising liberty, the Statue of Liberty has now become an allegory of the information saturation in which we are immersed. To come face to face with a life-size reproduction of this symbol in an exhibition space also reminds us of the statue’s original value, which has been vanishing into the global cacophony of its mass reproduction. Similarly, stigma and the negative values linked to AIDS have suffered from overexposure, which has overshadowed the positive medical advances that have increased the life expectancy and quality of life of people with HIV.

Irene Aristizábal
[Excerpt of the text for the exhibition catalogue]