‘Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional & Transnational Perspectives’ Conference: A Portfolio

Guest editor Theo Gordon presents a portfolio of writings from participants of the ‘Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional and Transnational Perspectives’ conference hosted by the History of Art Department at the University of York in June of 2025. 

Table of Contents

Ephemeral Graphic Traces by Siân Cook 

Continuous Dialogues: Temporalities of HIV/AIDS, a Brazilian exhibition in contact with the world by João Eduardo Freitas and Ricardo Ayres

Remembering Ricardo Rojas Toro (1955–2024) by aliwen

Introduction: The Imperfect Dance 

In 1986, the choreographer Lloyd Newson and his partner Nigel Charnock debuted My Sex, Our Dance at The Place in London, the first work of Newson’s new dance company DV8. This pas de deux exploring relationality in the era of HIV and AIDS all starts with a handshake: Newson and Charnock meet centre stage and grip hands, tightly. From this initial, highly conventional, point of contact, an intricate sequence of intertwined physical movement spins out. They begin to pull and destabilise each other, falling to the floor in a tousled wrestle. The pair somersault and backflip, throwing themselves across the space to rely on each other’s catch. The action is relentless: moments of extreme tenderness, holding each other in embrace, are counterpoised with indifference and nonreciprocity, as one lets the other fall. In an affecting sequence, Charnock first catches Newson upside down in a cartwheel, yet when Charnock makes repeated attempts to jump into Newson’s arms, clinging onto him by the neck, Newson stands impassive, in refusal. All this time, a heterosexual couple sit at a café table downstage, easily kissing and caressing each other, oblivious to the physical drama playing out around them; their socially-sanctioned relationship contrasts dramatically to Newson and Charnock’s frenzied, fraught, yet deeply felt attempt to connect. Such a difference between long established convention and newly invented mode was central to Newson’s intervention into dance in the 1980s. As dance critic Sophie Constanti had it, My Sex, Our Dance made ‘a mockery of conventional notions of support systems in partnerwork’, showing the breakdown of established repertoire and movement under the pressure of the need to reinvent relations.¹ The work dramatises the often yawning gap between ideals of equality and reciprocity and the actual imperfections of the practice of trying to relate in the shadow of HIV and AIDS. Indeed, Newson and Charnock show that such moments of mismatch might be the most interesting and productive.

In my own work as a writer and organiser thinking about art and HIV and AIDS, I am very interested in imperfect events, especially in an age in which we are frequently called to take heed of the ideals of diversity, equality and inclusion. Marika Cifor’s injunction in her book Viral Cultures (2022) that ‘AIDS is still a crisis, and it should be one to you’, and her caution against ‘historicizing AIDS activism in ways that support white supremacist patriarchy by acknowledging only white men, marking AIDS activism as past, and ignoring the failures and limitations of early AIDS activism, and thereby the existence and needs of marginalized communities, especially Black, brown, Indigenous and trans, where the American AIDS epidemic continues unabated’, are indicative of the vehemence with which such ideals are propounded at present.² Given the strength of such politically-correct dictates, and a wider, general sense that the world is changing faster than we know, it is odd that the written conference report and edited proceeding seems to have vanished as a literary form. The precise importance of such classics of the genre as Carole S. Vance’s Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984), presenting the material from the Scholar and the Feminist IX conference, ‘Towards a Politics of Sexuality’ at Barnard College in New York on April 24, 1982, is that they dramatise very clearly the wild divergences and active conflicts of the live debates of the time.

Whilst the majority of edited books and special issues nowadays find first inspiration in conferences and symposia, it is the messiness and gaps of such proceedings that are the first things prospective editors look to smooth over and fill. One of the casualties of this trend to tidiness is the loss of the sense of how knowledge is produced between people gathered together. Such a loss is particularly unfortunate for HIV and AIDS cultures, given that knowledge and understanding of this epidemic has a history of being fomented in marginal and minor places, in disagreement and debate in queer magazines, community newsletters, videotapes and their screenings, leaflets and other ephemera. In the spirit of Newson and Charnock’s passionate, fitful embrace in My Sex, Our Dance, in this portfolio I present some of the research on art and HIV and AIDS that emerged through a gathering I organised last year at the University of York in the North of England, in order to foreground the real life complexities and pleasures of meeting at an event that was in many ways ‘imperfect’. As Wendy Houstoun, a dancer for DV8, explained, My Sex, Our Dance and the company’s other works were about foregrounding ‘the emotive bit that is the real life part of politics - how people feel about things’.³ This portfolio reaffirms the importance of imperfect communication through minor forms in the present moment of cultural work on art and HIV and AIDS.

In June 2025, I convened a conference on ‘Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional and Transnational Perspectives’ in the History of Art Department at the University of York that featured artists, curators, academics, graphic designers, activists, writers and others with long-term investments in these issues working in diverse international contexts. The speakers included Landriel Oviedo (Argentina), Ricardo Henrique Ayres Alves and João Eduardo Peçanha de Freitas (Brazil), Beau Gomez (Canada), Benny Nemer (France), Pu Aliwen (Japan), Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Samuel Perea-Díaz (Spain), James Boaden, Siân Cook, Elliot Gibbons, Tom Houlton, Dominic Johnson, Richard Sawdon-Smith, Louis Shankar, Simon Watney, and Benedict Welch (United Kingdom), and Ted Kerr, Pato Herbert and George Ayala (United States). When writing the call for papers I was interested in what new methods were in development for thinking through the connections between different contexts of production and reception for art and visual culture addressing HIV and AIDS. This question was especially important in Europe, as a sequence of recent retrospective exhibitions across the continent including United by AIDS (2019), Every Moment Counts (2022), Exposé·es (2023) and Aux temps du sida (2023-24) had largely held to an established United States-France axis, with VIH/sida: L’épidémie n’est pas finie! (2021-22) as a notable exception.⁴

I hoped that the conference as a social space might push lines of thought forward and induce new collaborative work, even as I became increasingly aware that in some ways the event was falling short of certain ideals of political engagement in the present: almost all of the proposals were from men, some constituencies were entirely absent as speakers, and with a highly limited budget I would not be able to support everyone to travel to York in person. Pulling strings behind the scenes, with the fantastic and often unsung administrators at York (thank you Laura Reid) and some last minute extra funding from the Humanities Research Centre (thank you Rachel Cowgill) meant that we could stretch to many, but not all, attending, with a strong online contingent as well. The proceedings began in advance, with three online workshops for all attendees and the wider research community at York. First, on May 8, 2025, the artist and researcher Conal McStravick and the art historian Fiona Anderson screened and discussed the British video artist Stuart Marshall’s recently rediscovered tape Kaposi’s Sarcoma (1983), and I presented some of my research on the British artist Helen Chadwick and her seminal digital photomontage Viral Landscapes (1989). Second, on May 15, the historian and curator João Eduardo Peçanha de Freitas screened the Brazilian film The First Fallen (2021), before leading an in-conversation with the film’s director Rodrigo di Oliveira. Third, on May 29, the art historian James Boaden led a post-screening discussion of Gregg Bordowitz’s video Habit (2001) on HIV and art in the South African context.

In many ways, the geographical and socio-political scope of the conference was broad and diverse. In my introduction to the event itself, I opted to foreground some of the possible exclusions from the presentations that were to follow, especially of more women speakers, in the context of the Trump Administration’s impending cuts to PEPFAR in Summer 2025, trying to keep open the awareness of the gaps between the political ideal of equality in knowledge production, its material realities, and wider ongoing and impending inequities. Over the following two days, the framework of local, regional and transnational, and the sensitive ways in which all the participants engaged and challenged it through their material, effected a significant displacement of cliched stories of centre and periphery in HIV and AIDS cultures. For example, in an exhibition for this portfolio developed from her presentation, Siân Cook shows how locally produced ephemeral materials, such as leaflets, t-shirts, pins and packets, open onto situated histories of making in particular moments of the epidemic’s history, here drawn from the UK context yet revelatory of a new way of thinking the relationship between specific, embedded work and wider social movements. In a presentation also expanded into an essay here, Ricardo Henrique Ayres Alves and João Eduardo Peçanha de Freitas charted the development of their exhibition Diálogos Contínuous: Temporalidades do HIV/aids (2025) in Porto Alegre out of their research into historic exhibitions in Brazil such as Art Against AIDS (1994) and the importance of such group shows in Europe as Tema: AIDS (1993) to the nurturing of Brazilian artists meditating on AIDS in their work, upending frequent European navel gazing to tell this history anew. In the final essay in this portfolio, Aliwen expands upon how their relationship with the Chilean artist Ricardo Rojas Toro reframed their understanding of aesthetic practices of survival and how and when HIV might be thought to ‘appear’ in works of painting.

Altogether, the essays here demonstrate some of the thinking that informed and developed from the York conference, marking the significance of gathering even in conditions that seem in some ways to fail the demands of representation and equality in our current moment. It struck me then as now that there are serious dangers in allowing ideals to discredit the inevitably imperfectly diverse line up of any gathering or event. In this increasingly uncertain and unstable world, as we must urgently heed the call to equality, so we also must not throw everything overboard in the process. It’s about the long game, feeling out how to work, create and continue, however we find ourselves arrayed. In that spirit, I end this introduction to the portfolio with four short personal reflections from speakers at the conference on the nature of the event, to leave the sense of it as rough-shod, fragmentary, and hopefully creative and energetic, much as Newson and Charnock’s wrestle in My Sex, Our Dance.

Elliot Gibbons
University College London

As I thumb through the pages of my notebook from the conference, I realise how the messiness of these scribbled thoughts or references reflected an emerging thread in my own research. While these notes inherently flatten the varied panels and informal conversations that took place into somewhat indecipherable strings of letters, there is a liveliness to them in that they index a bountiful consideration of the art and visual culture addressing HIV and AIDS largely outside of North America, specifically New York. The first session, chaired by Fiona Anderson, comprised of aliwen’s paper on the late artist Ricardo Rojas Toro’s multi-media practice responding to HIV/ AIDS in Chile after the dictatorship, Ricardo Henrique Ayres Alves & João Eduardo Peçanha de Freitas analysis of Brazilian artists exhibited within a number of European group shows on HIV/AIDS and my paper on the collaborative duo Ridgeway Bennett’s whose practice was located in the US by local critics despite the duo predominantly working in Britain.

Ridgeway Bennett was an artistic collaboration between Jeremy Ridgeway and David Bennett, who were also romantic partners. Jeremy was born in London but raised in Zimbabwe and South Africa, whereas David was born in Malawi. In 1994, Jeremy died from AIDS related complications, and David’s whereabouts afterwards are currently unknown. They began their collaboration whilst living in London and exhibited frequently with the Brixton Artists Collective in the 1980s. In 1988, the duo began living between New York and London before returning to the British capital more definitively in 1992.⁵ In my paper, I traced the duo’s exhibition history in the US and the UK, paying particular attention to how their artworks intersected with various discourses around the abject, censorship and AIDS in these two cities. The papers respectively resisted levelling the specificity of the ongoing epidemics as the visual material discussed crossed borders: an issue that the conference panellists and sessions carried out and probed extensively, too. Glancing back at these half-sentences, I realise how foundational the conference was to my research on art and HIV/AIDS in Britain, actively encouraging me to critically consider the transnational beyond the US and the UK.

Landriel Oviedo
Chuquis, La Rioja, Argentina

Participating in the York conference was a deeply meaningful experience for me. I joined the event virtually, but from the very beginning I felt a strong sense of belonging. Just minutes before my presentation, Theo asked me a simple question — “Are you happy?” — and I remember feeling genuinely moved. I have participated in many spaces as an activist over the years, but this was the first time I truly felt I was in the right place: sharing with peers who understand the symbolic, historical and political dimension of positive artivism, and who look at the world through a similar prism.

I deeply value the care with which the conference was organized and the sustained dialogue we shared throughout the process. I was also grateful for the opportunity to strengthen my exchange with Ted Kerr and to learn from his presentation, which resonated strongly with my own hypotheses. The work of Jorge Bordello was another powerful presence during the conference, someone whose trajectory I admire deeply and feel closely connected to.

My virtual participation also speaks to a broader structural condition. This is not a critique of the conference itself, but rather a reflection on how international and multilateral funding agendas still struggle to recognize artivism as a legitimate site of knowledge production. While certain forms of activism aligned with dominant global agendas receive sustained support, artivist practices that critically engage with HIV, memory, bodies and territory, especially from the Global South, often remain unfunded. In my case, neither my country, my university, nor international networks were able to support my physical presence, despite the importance of embodied encounter for collective thinking and long-term alliances.

Even so, the pre-conference workshops and the conference itself reaffirmed something essential for me: positive artivism is not only a form of expression or advocacy, but a way of producing situated knowledge. Being part of this gathering, even at a distance, strengthened my commitment to that practice and to the communities that sustain it.

Benedict Welch 
University of Sussex

The conference was an extremely generative experience. It allowed cross-disciplinary and cross-border connections to flourish and there was an undeniable sense of collaboration. Ted Kerr's talk on 'HIV Exceptionalism' was a fine example of this. It was rich to observe the responses to Kerr's work in progress and feel how significant Kerr's topic was to an audience comprising various generations of activists, scholars and educators. The responses affirmed just how important questions of language are, not to mention the urgent need for geographical specificity when talking about HIV/AIDS. One response, for example, was about the need to distinguish between the UK and US responses to the epidemic, often subsumed under that mostly unhelpful descriptor of 'Western'.

I hoped to show in my own contribution to the conference—about David Wojnarowicz's uptake of the whirling dervish in his writing and performance—that works that are now often thought indicative of a very American response to the epidemic were always already in conversation with ideas gleaned, learned or appropriated much further afield. At the end of my presentation, Dominic Johnson asked me why a critical interrogation of Wojnarowicz's work mattered now. It was the classic 'why now?' question, but it has stayed with me as a reminder of the dance that any researcher does, the necessary moves that must be made between the past and the present. The now from which I write is a different now to the time of the conference, a now that feels more frightening in the sheer horrors directed towards queers, people of colour, immigrants and women. My answer then, if memory serves, was that a critical engagement was necessary because it ensured Wojnarowicz's complicated personhood was maintained. I stand by that but, looking back in this 'now' of the present, I can see how the conference has affirmed my belief that a rigorous interrogation of the past must always be in service of the present and its own attendant emergencies. As Jean Carlomusto puts it in Gregg Bordowitz's film 'Fast Trip, Long Drop' (1993), 'You have to tell your own history to make it advance, and so the point I think of remembering is to reinvent ourselves.’ I'm grateful to have been involved in the conference and to have been placed in conversation with scholars, artists and researchers from all around the world, keen to retell and advance the complex interweaving connections the HIV/AIDS epidemic has across its multifarious geographical contexts.

Thomas Houlton
University of York

My overriding memory of the panel I chaired on the final day of the Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS conference is one of emotion. Although all of the conference panels were, to some extent, emotional, this particular one felt charged with the kind of feeling that—to me anyway—seemed to be particularly special, and felt not just by myself and the speakers, but the audience as well. James Boaden (University of York), discussed the lives, afterlives and crip aesthetics of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993); Richard Sawdon Smith (Norwich University of the Arts) presented reflections on his live five-week artist residency A Life Lived Through Photography, held at Norwich East Gallery (8^th August – 9^th September 2023); and Dominic Johnson (QMUL), examined the archive and work of artist Hamad Butt (1962-1994), whose first major retrospective, at Whitechapel Gallery, London (4^th June – 7^th September 2025), Dominic also curated.

As I sat and absorbed the papers, along with a scribble of notes, I also jotted down a question that had, in many ways, been hovering at the corner of discussions throughout the previous panels. Listening to these impassioned speakers I started to think about the position we occupy as academics, curators, archivists, artists, receivers (and makers) of works dealing with AIDS and HIV. To work with HIV is to relate to trauma, or the dead, in some way: a means of listening, of working with. And in that ‘working with’ the dead we also, inevitably, tread the line between speaking with and speaking for them. When I put this to the panel it began a discussion that spilled over into all kinds of other spheres: living with HIV, masculinity, trust, failure, trauma, love, community, care.

Even though working with different media and materials, and across different archives (and in Richard’s case, working with his own body of/as work), it became clear that what is partly at stake in what we do, in what AIDS/HIV scholarship and practice is necessarily about, is to both delineate-and-resist the pull towards the biographical, the diagnosis, the death, as the only means of making meaning. Even though questions of ethics, privacy, or respect must never be far from our work, the vitality of the past must also be engaged with, particularly when that vitality includes toxicity, infection, grief, fear, and intimate information, sometimes of the most awful kind. It isn’t just what bears repeating, but what we can bear to repeat.

Richard’s gallery residency, a challenge to received notions of how an HIV archive can be about a witnessing that is speculative, inconclusive, playful even in its gathering of trauma, resists these implications, making the HIV archive (and body) not only active but activist. James’s investigation of Blue’s afterlives renews important intersections between HIV/AIDS scholarship and (queer) crip theory, and forces us to think again about how to de-prioritise the non-disabled audience as the assumed receiver of the work. Dominic’s curation of Butt doesn’t just bring his challenging, delicate, deadly art into its rightful place in a major gallery space, it allows the past to work us over, to transform us, to activate us in its toxic play with bromine, iodine, chlorine, and ultraviolet light, all encased in the most fragile of glass forms. As Dominic summed it up, working with Butt’s art it is like receiving ‘a field message from the abyss’.

What strikes me in recalling this panel is not just the voices and impressions of the three speakers: their emotions, their catches of voice, their pauses for breath at moments of gathering, of vulnerability. It is also the emotions and voices of those they are working with. Working in conversation, in collaboration, in affection: with artists, with strangers, with idols, with friends, with lovers, even with themselves across time. I have chaired many panels, but few will remain with me as this one has.

Theo Gordon is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, working on a book on art and HIV/AIDS in the United Kingdom. He was recently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History of Art at the University of York. The co-author, with Flora Dunster, of Photography: A Queer History (Ilex, 2024), his essays on modern and contemporary art have been published in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal and InVisible Culture, and he recently co-edited a special issue of British Art Studies on 'Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s' (2025). He reviews regularly for Burlington Contemporary.