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Activist groups responding to the emergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis as it emerged in North America and Europe used visual art as a key tool in their campaigns. Posters, photography, Super 8 films and performance-based practice were all used in an effort to force public health bodies, politicians and pharmaceutical companies to respond with appropriate funding and research to the virus. The New York chapter of the campaign group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) worked with artist collective Gran Fury and many other now well-known artists involved in documenting the effects of the disease: Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring and Nan Goldin amongst them. Analysis of the visual representation of HIV/AIDS has largely been limited to this New York arts scene. I contend that this is symptomatic of an unconscious universalism surrounding the visual culture of HIV/AIDS permeating the field’s key foundational texts (Watney 1987; Gilman 1988; Crimp 1988; Sontag 1989), which, in a wider sense, limits the understanding of HIV/AIDS itself. This paper seeks to broaden the understanding of HIV/AIDS through attention to specific cultural, political and linguistic context. It will employ a comparative analysis of the visual language of HIV/AIDS in the French and Québécois contexts, considering the trans-Atlantic va-et-vient of the virus itself, as well as the visual language surrounding it, using the self-shot artist films of Hervé Guibert (France) and Esther Valiquette (Québec). Commenting on the Ebola crisis in West Africa, Johnson and Walsh (2018) emphasise the dangers of a universal approach on the part of global health organisations, a culture-blind approach preventing such groups from effectively engaging with specific communities. They underline that in order to be effective, such organisations ‘must work with communities, not do something to them’. Through the comparative analysis of self-produced visual work from varying cultural contexts, this paper argues for the importance of the specificities of cultural context for the understanding of HIV/AIDS, its epidemiology and for the ongoing efficacy of prevention programmes.
Elliot Evans is the author of Queer Permeability: The Body in French Thought from Wittig to Preciado (2020). With a background in Modern Languages, Elliot’s research is concerned with the ways in which constructions of sexuality and gender vary across cultures, and with how these identities are elaborated through writing and visual production. Elliot teaches on the MRes Sexuality & Gender Studies and the MA in Comparative Literature and Critical Theories at the University of Birmingham, and is co-organiser of the seminar series 'Critical Sexology'.
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