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AIDS denialism in South Africa to be explored in Peltz exhibit

Picasso's masterpiece, Guernica, enlisted in the fight against AIDS in South Africa

Keiskamma Guernica photo credit: Robert Hofmeyr

HIV/AIDS denialism under the regime of former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, and its impact upon women and children, will be explored in a forthcoming art exhibition at the Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck School of Arts.

Artists and campaigners who were at the epicenter of the South African HIV/AIDS crisis in the late 1990s and early 2000s will gather at the London gallery this winter to explore the crossover between the spheres of art, medicine and politics.

Positive Living: Art and AIDS in South Africa, which runs at the gallery on 43 Gordon Square from 14 November 2015 to 22 January 2016, is the first exhibition in the UK to showcase the extraordinary range of South African artists and makers’ responses to the epidemic with examples of fine art, print-making, painting, photography, beadwork and embroidery.

A central piece of the exhibit will be a specially commissioned version of The Keiskamma Guernica. The Keiskamma Art Project from South Africa’s Eastern Cape — an area decimated by HIV/AIDS — has transposed the horror of Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, which centred on Franco’s massacre of innocent civilians, onto the Eastern Cape to tell the tale of this small community’s harrowing struggle against HIV through beadwork and embroidery.

The original full-scale Keiskamma Guernica, which was created in 2010, has been inaccessible to the public since its acquisition by the Red Location Museum, Port Elizabeth. The Peltz Gallery’s specially commissioned smaller scale version of the 2010 mural, therefore, offers a rare opportunity to view the extraordinarily affecting artwork up close.

Other prominent artists participating in the exhibition include:

    • Photographer, Gideon Mendel, who has been documenting the impact of HIV/Aids in South Africa for over 15 years. The exhibition includes a special selection of his latest video work, Thru’ Positive Eyes
    • Influential contemporary South African artists, Sue Williamson and Penny Siopis, whose ‘Baby in Red’ piece will be on display
    • South African artist and activist, Nondumiso Hlwele, whose life-sized ‘Bodymap’ — a therapeutic tool used to articulate the personal impact of HIV/AIDS on the body — a will also be on display

      The 10-week-long exhibition is curated by Professor Annie Coombes, of Birkbeck’s History of Art Department.

      She said: “The Positive Living exhibition is one of the first in the UK to chart the full range of visual responses to the epidemic in South Africa. It explores the way art and the process of painting and other creative practices produced effective therapeutic treatments for HIV/AIDS sufferers and enabled proactive memory work as a legacy for bereaved families and children.

      “An aim of the exhibit, therefore, is to provoke a discussion with health professionals, journalists and artists in the UK about the comparative relevance of those strategies originally devised to meet the HIV challenge in South Africa, as well as to highlight the journey that still lies ahead in tackling the dark legacy these troubled years have left in their wake.”

      Positive Living: Art and AIDS in South Africa, runs at the Peltz Gallery, 43 Gordon Square, from Saturday 14 November 2015 to Friday 22 January 2016. Opening times are Mondays to Fridays, 10am-8pm, and Saturdays, 10am-5pm. The exhibit is supported by Birkbeck, University of London and the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund.

      An associated symposium will also run during the exhibition. Women and HIV/AIDS in South Africa: Medicine, Art, Activism, which is being co-organized by Professor Coombes and Dr. Hilary Spire in the Department of History at Birkbeck, will be held on 7 and 8 December. Among the speakers will be Pioneering HIV/AIDS and South African gay-rights activist, Edwin Cameron, Justice of the South African Constitutional Court and Vuyiseka Dubula, former Deputy Leader of Treatment Action Campaign.

      (Keiskamma Guernica photo credit:Robert Hofmeyr)

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