HIV/AIDS in South Africa: Gender, Art and Activism – Introduction

Abstract

This part-special issue arises from a Wellcome Trustand JSAS-funded conference in December 2015, held in conjunction with the ‘Positive Living: Art and AIDS in South Africa’ exhibition, curated by Annie E. Coombes at the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a public lecture by the internationally renowned human rights advocate and HIV activist Justice Edwin Cameron. Timed to mark World AIDS Day, the symposium took place a decade after the period of AIDS denialism under Thabo Mbeki’s presidency and at a time of persisting and new challenges facing those living with HIV in South Africa (and elsewhere). The years of the Mbeki presidency also saw what have subsequently been hailed as some of the most innovative visual and political campaigns around HIV/AIDS in the world. We were concerned to historicise current strategies for overcoming the challenges of the longer-term effects of a pandemic that has left a damaging legacy, despite the notable earlier successes. To what extent might strategies that contributed to the transformation of government policy still be relevant in the fourth decade of the pandemic? In the context of rising levels of youth unemployment, increased violence against women and shrinking resources, how do gender, age and generation shape responses to old and new challenges? What were the lessons to be learnt from the earlier political and visual activist campaigns for the provision of anti-retrovirals? In order to confront continuing stigmatisation of and disadvantage to those living with HIV in South Africa, we also wanted to explore what it might mean to have a greater degree of collaboration between the clinical, the therapeutic and the educational. Consequently, the symposium aimed to provoke conversations among stakeholders who generally address separate audiences. Although there has been a long-standing exchange between policy makers, social scientists and medical researchers, we wanted to expand this knowledge base to include historians of the pandemic together with art historians and artists as critical agents of any response to HIV/AIDS. Together with the related exhibition at the Peltz Gallery, another aim of the conference was to stimulate a wider awareness in the UK of the South African campaigns and of the comparative value of the lessons learnt from these campaigns for those living with HIV from among young black and minority ethnic (BME) groups and the wider African diaspora in London.