‘I started getting involved in Aids activism [in the United States] around 1986 and at the beginning it was fabulous because we were out in the streets protesting and promoting change. But I don’t think we were prepared to start seeing our friends and lovers die,” says artist Jean Carlomusto.
Carlomusto’s Offerings (2008) installation forms part of the Not Alone exhibition that opened at the Durban Art Gallery last week. The piece draws on the memento mori genre, exploring death, memory and mortality.
An associate professor of media arts at Long Island University in the US, Carlomusto says the work was also inspired by art historian Douglas Crimp’s observation: “Aids activists should attend to the work of mourning with the same commitment given to their militancy.”
“It was an intense time,” Carlomusto says of her activism in San Francisco in the 1980s. “You reached a stage where activist work — the grassroots response to the epidemic — consumed your day and then you spent your nights nursing people, or mourning for them.”
An interactive computer and video installation, Offerings draws on the Catholic act of lighting a candle in memory of the dead. The installation is a U-shaped altar with 36 electronic votive candles. Each candle and corresponding button has a picture of an Aids comrade: some, like the Treatment Action Campaign’s Zackie Achmat, still living with HIV/Aids, others long gone.
The viewer is invited to press on a button, the corresponding candle brightens, the others dim and an individual video clip is projected on to a screen: “I included statements that crystallised an experience in the fabric of a pandemic. Not all the messages are positive and uplifting,” she says.
The exhibition, an international project of Make Art/Stop Aids, features artists from around the world including South Africans such as Churchill Madikida (Virus, 2004), William Kentridge (Tide Table, 2002) and Zanele Muholi (Aftermath, 2004 and Case Number, 2004).
The exhibition highlights the global commonalities in the experiences and responses to HIV/Aids. It also reflects the changing histories and dynamics of the disease in various countries — and how artists and activists engage with this change.
Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, for example, started taking photographs of truck drivers and sex workers in the late 1980s — some of the first known HIV infections in India. According to co-curator David Gere, she found that her black-and-white pictures “were increasing the stigmatisation surrounding these groups”.
Uncomfortable with this effect, she trained her lens on the care-givers instead. Caregiver, Dr Deivanayagam and Chennai (1988), the three photographs included in the exhibition, are cropped to exclude the identity of those living with HIV/Aids, yet the compassion and love of the caregivers is palpable — luminous, almost — alluding to the common space of familial love and professional concern.
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra’s Let’s Play Safe — 2 (2007) is a large acrylic-and-oil painting on canvas with an orgiastic sensibility. Anonymous bodies and limbs intertwine with flowers and vines as if from the euphemistic garden love scenes in a Bollywood film.
Yet included at the bottom of the piece, are instructions on condom use. “It’s about eroticising and opening up the discourse around condom use.
These guys are proper “art school boys” and 10 years ago there were no painters or graphic artists in India coming out of these schools and engaging with HIV/Aids. That’s changed,” says Gere.
Daniel Goldstein and John Kapella’s Medicine Man (2007), meanwhile, moves away from issues around battling stigma or safe sex advocacy. Medicine Man, is about living with HIV/Aids and trying to live with the drugs one consumes to live. Goldstein says he collected almost 300 HIV/Aids medication bottles from friends, their lovers, and his own to create the piece.
Arranged around the form of a man are 139 syringes, the point of each tipped with a red droplet. When lit, the luminosity is breathtaking. “Creating the man was like sculpting a figure — they have great flexibility. The syringes are arranged in the shape of madorlas, or almond-shaped halos. In many ancient traditions, holy people were depicted standing within such halos, but in this instance — with the needles pointing inwards — the needles may suggest an intense bombardment,” said Goldstein.
Goldstein, who says anti-retrovirals now are “much milder compared to the old days” hoped to capture the duality of consuming drugs to live with HIV/Aids: “It’s a poison which is killing you, but also the potion which is saving you,” he says.
Not Alone exhibits at the Durban Art Gallery until mid-May. Other pieces included in the exhibition are the Keiskamma Altarpiece (2006). A staggering multi-layered piece (4.1m X6.8m) which draws conceptual influence from the 16th century Isenheim altarpiece found in France. The original was commissioned by the Antonine religious order, which cared for those suffering from an illness known as the St Anthony’s Fire. In the Eastern Cape village of Hamburg, 120 people — mainly women — under the direction of a local doctor, Carol Hofmeyer, through the use of beading and wiring to tell related their own experiences of the effects of the HIV/Aids pandemic on their community. Having returned from a two-year international tour, this is the first time the Keiskamma Altarpiece is being exhibited in a South African art gallery.