The HIV/AIDS pandemic is not a thing of the past. In 2022, UNAIDS estimated 39 million people around the globe live with HIV. Although we have made enormous leaps in awareness and medical research since the peak of the epidemic in 1995, 1.3 million people became newly infected with HIV in 2022, and 630,000 died due to AIDS related-causes, a statistical snapshot of how much further we must go.
Since the early days of the epidemic artists living with the virus and artists who lost loved ones to it have been visualising its complexities. However, most of this cultural production has been and continues to be concentrated in the USA and Europe, even though a majority of new infections now occur outside these regions. Dis-visible Narratives – initiated as an intervention into SAVVY.doc and guided by curator Shaunak Mahbubani – probes the reasons for this asymmetry, imagining models of archiving and display that centre the specific social dynamics of living with HIV in the Global South, towards creating an archive hospitable to published and unpublished narratives.
"These [wounded] archives lose the ability to move, to circulate with their previous complexity, and/or are impaled causing a loss of content and context allowing the stories of the oppressor to infiltrate and subjugate them. Yet, the vitality of our archives is greater than the force of the colonizer. They are wounded, but they will not fall." — Shaunak Mahbubani
Building on Mahbubani's articulation of the wounded archive, dis-visibility is proposed as a form of epistemological wounding caused primarily by structural stigma. The prefix “dis– locates its tactics within the realm of disablement, or the enactment of restrictions "by the political, economic and cultural norms of a society which takes little or no account of people who have impairments and thus excludes them from mainstream activity" (Mike Oliver, 1990). In the case of cultural production around HIV/AIDS in the Global South, this dis-visibility sits atop the wider effects of neo-colonial structures that advantage white creators and those located in the Global North. It is aggravated by social, material, and in some locations, legal discrimination against those who speak publicly about their positive HIV status, as well as increased costs of survival for PLHA without arts infrastructures that can support this, amongst other factors. Rooted in the shame attached to HIV via it's deplorable early labelling as GRID, as a condition caused by deviance and hedonism, compounded by the nascent nature of movements for queer equality across the South, dis-visability is often enacted through self-censorship, hindering the very creation of artwork and as well as its emergence into the public realm.
TRIAGE, the first of four research phases, seeks to understand and organise the impact of external factors in making artwork around delicate subjects public. Which questions of structure, of safety, of visibility and opacity must we ask ourselves – as researchers, archivists, curators – in the process of assembling and exhibiting a wounded archive? Alongside broader considerations, we also survey the conditions under which art around HIV/AIDS is made public, challenging us to create measures of agency, mutability, and reciprocity as part of making these dis-visible narratives cautiously visible. The project will grow iteratively across each exhibition chapter of SAVVY’s new artistic programming, beginning now with CURES: CHRONIC PROMISES and followed by exhibitions on Labour, Society, and Historical Children.
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What systems of curatorial, institutional, and social support are required to display wounded archives?
What can we gain by reallocating agency and resources from the ethnographer to the auto-narrator?
How do we curatorially, socially, politically protect those who speak from lived experience?
What labour is required to modulate the opacity of an archive?
What do we lose on entrusting a state complicit in genocide to harbour our wounded archives?
What kinds of infrastructure do we need to ease dis-visability around HIV/AIDS?
What have artists lost in becoming visible about their HIV status?
How has the NGO-ification of the HIV/AIDS movement in the Global South affected the radical potential of cultural production? OR How does reliance on institutional funding affect wounded archives?
How do we include the work of artists who died from AIDS related-causes before they were able to claim their narrative?
How does (dis-)visability impact others with similar conditions?
How do the effects of visibility change after changing one's location?
OR why do many artists make work about HIV after migrating to the Global North?
What effects does proximity to white actors have on dis-visability, and what are its hidden costs?