Art, Visual Culture and HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional and Transnational Perspectives

How can attention to artistic practices and visual interventions from across the global mosaic of local contexts contribute meaningfully to the decentring of hegemonic narratives and research on art and HIV/AIDS? What new configurations of work from across both global south and north are necessary to re-assess the histories of this epidemic, and intervene in its ongoing present? This conference invites papers that examine the state of the field in the study of art, visual culture and HIV/AIDS, presenting recent or ongoing research projects that seek to complicate understandings of this vast area of contemporary life. The conference will be the summation of Theo Gordon’s Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of York, ‘Viral Landscapes: Art and HIV/AIDS in the UK’, a project which attends to the specificities of response to the epidemic in the British context, in an attempt to move from the dominance of the American story in Euro-American art history. The city of York has been the site of historic efforts to expand the frame of reference for HIV/AIDS, in Sunil Gupta and Tessa Boffin’s exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (Impressions Gallery of Photography, 1990). This conference will build on this legacy in the new context of our present moment.

Recent years have seen a continued burgeoning of archival, curatorial and scholarly projects that account for artistic production and reception in varied international contexts, including the archive The Art of AIDS (2004-2020), examining Australia, South Africa, and the United States, and a series of large-scale survey exhibitions in Europe (2019-2024) that have largely cleaved to a Euro-American axis. Critics continue to call for analyses that complicate the divisions of ‘AIDS time’ to account for the varied pharmacological regimes of life under HIV/AIDS globally. So far, this work has had varied and uneven impact on curatorial and disciplinary practices, as the teaching of “art and the AIDS crisis” in Western universities still favours a handful of emblematic practices, and the dynamic relationships between artists, activists and public health workers remain under-examined. This conference asks, where do we go from here? What new approaches and methodologies might we need in order to connect stories of art and HIV between diverse times and spaces? Have artworks and artists already provided answers to questions that in some national contexts seem new, and in others, familiar and intractable? What new subjectivities are in formation, and how can the history of art and visual culture inform them now?

Submissions are welcome from researchers in any discipline and in any context (ie. from art history to public health) working on art and visual culture in response to HIV/AIDS. Please send a 400 word abstract and 200 word bio to theo.gordon@york.ac.uk by 20 January 2025. We have the capability for virtual presentations, as well as some travel funding for speakers, and we are applying for additional funding to support travel and honoraria for precarious workers. The conference will be preceded by three workshops on art and HIV/AIDS at the University of York (evenings GMT), organised around readings and discussion based on recent key interventions in the field. These will also be in hybrid online/in-person form, and the first is scheduled for February 2025.