CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The HIV HOWLER: Transmitting Art and Activism

YOU ARE INVITED TO SUBMIT YOUR WORK TO the upcoming issues of The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism, a newspaper focusing on global grassroots HIV art and cultural production, to be released in July 2022. Artworks will be featured in Issue 6 on the topic of HOME and Issue 7 on the topics of SPIRIT + SUBSTANCE.

The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism is a limited edition art newspaper focusing on global grassroots HIV art and cultural production. Artists have and continue to play a fundamental role in shaping broader societal understandings of HIV and working within communities that are most impacted by the virus: queer and trans people, people who use drugs, sex workers, people of colour, and indigenous peoples. Together we reflect the immediacy and urgency of global HIV/AIDS dialogues as well as their historical continuities.

The HIV Howler is a forum for dialogue, a demand for aesthetic self-determination, a response to tokenism, and a guide to navigating the vibrational ambiguities between policy, pathology, and community. Accepting submissions from May 1st to June 1st, 2022. DEADLINE: June 1, 2022 ~ See below for detailed submission guidelines.

• Submit your work by email to jessicawhitbread@gmail.com and anthea.black@gmail.com with the subject line “HIV Howler and your first/last name”

• Submissions may include: artworks in any media, writing in any genre, texts, articles, letters, poetry, archival documents, performance documents, film stills, or any artistic media suitable for print in the newspaper format.

• The HIV Howler is interested in publishing work that explores the themes of HOME and SPIRIT and SUBSTANCE that will appear in Issue 6 and 7 and/or in future issues or exhibitions:

  • HOME: what sustains and protects you? is “home” defined by where you live, go to school, your political alignment, is home your people(s), a sense of belonging, or is culture a home?

    • Fundamentals of care and universal declarations, “housing access,” housing is a right, housing is prevention, housing precarity, affordable housing, homelessness, refugee experiences, diaspora, displacement, eviction, loss, comfort, heart, wealth, real estate bubbles/market greed, public/private spaces, accessible and communal housing; multi-family and multi-generational home spaces.

    • Architecture, DIY, craft/design, decor and the decorative, building spaces, skill, objects that symbolize home.

  • SPIRIT: Spiritual survival, transcendence, sacred spaces, altars and ancestors, worship, belief systems, humanism, religion, the church/mosque/temple.

    • Magic, ritual, witches, ghosts, sisters of perpetual indulgence, radical faeries and HIV/AIDS, feminist and queer practices of reclaiming spirituality.

    • Harm inflicted by doctrine, religious denial of the virus, punishment, purgatory, hell, the “god hates fags” era.

    • Sound, tone, frequencies that calm, waves, sonic, ping-back, sound waves bouncing off the edges, songs, spirituals, sonic meditation, sonic environments.

  • SUBSTANCE: using drugs, substance use, being high, harm reduction.

    • Escaping the body/reality, retreat into/out of the self, zoning out, altering mind/mood as an intrinsic component of the human condition, altered states/altars.

    • Body work, psychonautic experiences, the sacred queer body, chem sex, pleasure, communal communion, surviving is celebrating!

    • Craft and materiality, meeting needs through making, craft-based alchemies: textile dyeing, glass, metal and more, tactility, tacit knowledge, touch, physicality, the body.

• Reclaiming “transmission” and “going viral:” information, publishing, artist multiples, distribution, and circulation as vital forces in art and culture.

• Any other works that disrupt a one-dimensional image of living with HIV.

• Submissions from HIV+ long-term survivors will be prioritized.

• Submissions from HIV+ artists who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx and/or People of Colour, as well as HIV+ artists who identify as transgender, are welcome and will be prioritized.

• We welcome submissions in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Dutch, Russian, and Arabic, and other languages provided translation is available. Excerpts from featured submissions will be translated if possible.

• Submissions will be reviewed and selected by a global advisory team of artists, activists, and writers that is primarily made up of artists living with HIV. Our goals with The HIV Howler include creating global conversations between artists/activists, drawing attention to specific issues and local contexts, and using artist-led print publishing as a mode for the transmission of ideas and political interventions.

• Please note that The HIV Howler’s editorial mandate is to publish work by HIV+ cultural producers only. HIV negative people can help by sharing the call for submissions, supporting poz people to submit their artworks and writing, curating or writing about work by poz artists, and donating subscriptions for poz people globally.

• Successful submissions for featured content in The HIV Howler will receive a modest artist/writer fee with support for translation of selected sections, and a subscription including back-issues 1 through 5 of The HIV Howler.

• The HIV Howler cannot provide direct financial support to individual artists or writers to attend AIDS 2022, exhibitions, or related launches.

Publishers + Editors

Anthea Black and Jessica Whitbread

Editorial Advisory Committee

Anthea Black, Barbara Kemigisa, Theodore Kerr, Charles Long, Kairon Liu, Mikiki, Darien Taylor, L’Orangelis Thomas, and Jessica Whitbread.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the founding support of the Toronto Arts Council and project support for issues 5 and 6 from Alternative Exposure 13.

Distribution Partners

Art Metropole (Toronto), Visual AIDS and Printed Matter (New York), San Serriffe (Amsterdam), Casa Bosques (Mexico City).

Contact us if you’d like to become a HIV Howler distribution partner.

Review Process and Due Dates

The Advisory will review submissions from May 1st to June 1st, 2022.

We will notify accepted contributors by June 5th, 2022.

Final print-ready work will be due no later than June 15, 2022.

Applications will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• The artistic strength and creative vision of the proposed project.

• How the piece contributes to a global conversation on art and AIDS activism.

• How the work addresses, or expands and critiques, the key themes for Issue 6 and/or a future issue.

• How the work can be best represented in the physical print format of the newspaper.

• Please note that The HIV Howler’s editorial mandate is to publish work by HIV+ cultural producers only.

Application Checklist

Include all the following materials grouped together in a single email, with a maximum of 10 written pages in total, and/or 10 images, with no more than 10 MB file size.

Links to google drive folders, dropbox, or wetransfer are ideal.

*Feel free to email us with any questions in advance of the due date.

1. IN YOUR EMAIL to jessicawhitbread@gmail.com and anthea.black@gmail.com

Submit some general information about yourself and your application including the following:

A) Your Name

B) Mailing Address (This is used for your subscription/artist fee and will be kept confidential)

C) A 150-word biography. Please include a short description of your key projects as an artist, activist or HIV+ culture-maker. Biographies will be included on the Contributors page of the paper.

D) Your Project Title

E) Project Summary (200 words maximum)

• Tell us about your work in a short paragraph.

• What are the key themes and ideas that guide the piece?

• What form does your work take? (e.g. Submissions may include any artistic media suitable for print in the newspaper format: artworks, texts, articles, letters, archival documents, performance documents, film stills etc.)

2. ARTWORKS / VISUAL or TEXT-BASED SUBMISSION (10 MB maximum for all attachments)

Include the support materials that best reflect your work.

• Visual art submissions: Up to 10 JPGS formatted to fit within the 10 MB size guideline.

• Film/Video: Up to three works or 10 minutes of viewing time. Please send links to Vimeo, Youtube and/or still images. Film/video submissions will be published as 3 - 5 still images with a description or statement.

• Writing: Writers, critics, theorists, historians and/or activists who work with writing may submit up to 10 pages of completed texts, articles, or letters as a Word document. Please note we can only publish excerpts of longer submissions. All written material will be edited for length, clarity, and/or consistency with other texts in the newspaper.

• Print materials (e.g. archival materials, brochures, pamphlets, photographs, publications, books, etc.): Scan and submit the full document and/or an excerpt as a pdf file, and let us know if you have secured permission to reproduce.

3. LIST OF ARTWORKS / IMAGES (As a Word document)

Include a list that gives information about each artwork / item of your visual support materials. Indicate artist/activist name, title of the work, year of creation, media, and brief description of each image (maximum 50 words per image). This important information will be published as captions alongside artworks in the paper.

• If your submission is accepted, we will contact you to send your best quality images, preferably in tiff format for publication. CMYK images are preferred.