Scan Your Passport

At the International AIDS Conference 2022 in Montreal, it struck me that there were panel sessions without panelists present in the room. They were not there because the Canadian government had declined to issue visas for some AIDS activists and researchers who planned to attend the conference. I was privileged to be there and witnessed powerful activists at the large Global Village, the section of young and veteran AIDS activists and NGOs, but I also kept thinking about the people who could not be there. As I sifted through the Visual AIDS Artist+ Registry to create this gallery I reflected on these experiences at the conference this year and wondered how artists living with HIV have addressed issues of border control, travel, and nationalism, or even more deeply the psychological barriers and borders created by living with HIV under government control.

Ikegami recalled her conversation with Japanese officials in 1985, when she was told they could prevent the virus from entering Japan with "Mizugiwa-Taisaku", a phrase meaning border control measures that translates literally to "water's edge precautions/measures". In Japan today, you still often hear the word because of COVID-19. While many people know it's not effective, some feel safe because of it, and some others fear Japan becoming an isolated island.

When I think about the stressful, and somewhat scary, control we face at national borders, I often think of the Japanese artist collective Dumb Type’s pieces. In Dumb Type’s multi-media dance piece, pH, a large copy machine-like light bar moves back and forth throughout the performance. It scans the performers and the audience looks down at it from the upper-level rear. Towards the end, there are voices you hear at the borders being played, in English:

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One of the members of Dumb Type, Teiji Furuhashi, also performed in pH. When he traveled around the world with pH in the early 90s, he knew he had HIV, but did not tell the other members. In an essay for the pH catalogue, he wrote about passport controls at airports.

In the summer of 2022, there was a monkeypox outbreak. Japan still does not provide vaccines to prevent monkeypox despite the fact that there were cases found in the country. The Taiwanese artist Kairon Liu was in the United States before the vaccine was easily accessible, and he experienced a tough sickness when he had monkeypox.

Thinking about the use of power over our mobility which they call “border control,” I was also reminded of different kinds of control and walls, and how we are used to having these divides. The authority’s interrogation to our body happens daily to many people, especially to those who have stigmatized health conditions and those who lack resources and information. But we refuse, at least, letting them into to our minds. In Katherine Cheairs’ Voices at the Gate, a video made for Day With(out) Art 2021, you hear the readings of the poems and essays from the 1990s written by imprisoned women, most of the images show the dreamy landscape and flowers near the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State. The voices tell us about their personal and empowering communal experiences by and for the women inside the wall, at the same time, they also remind us that the prison or wall was not always part of the land.

Scan Your Passport concludes with a further selection of artworks from the Artist+ Registry that contemplate barriers and borders:

Sources:

“Black Ships of 1994” (Place Tokyo, 2021)

memorandum – teiji furuhashi (Little More, 2000)