HIVstories: Living Politics

Exhibition in Biennale Warszawa (MA3450) at Marszałkowska Street 34/50

How are politics and life narratives in the fields of HIV/AIDS activism entangled? This exhibition explores different ways of living politics from the perspectives of a variety of countries, communities and regions. It focuses on the ways in which lives are shaped by politics, and politics are shaped by lives in Poland, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany and on the European level. 

The World Health Organisation has identified Europe as one of two regions with the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world. While the impact and spread of the virus unfolds differently and unevenly across populations and regions of Europe, it has evoked multiple responses from most affected populations, civil society organisations and collectves. A multiplicity of lives and politics demonstrates that the fight against HIV/AIDS cannot be recounted as a single coherent story. Instead, it is presented here as an ongoing struggle with many disparities and a-synchronicities – all of which take on unique expression in each political, legal and social context. Taken together, HIVstories offers a glimpse into the complex, creative and at times contradictory dynamics of HIV/AIDS activism across the region. It reveals Europe as a historically shifting, disputed, and dynamic geographic, social and political entity. 

The exhibition is made up of narratives and objects that have been collected over the course of a three-year international research project. Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (EUROPACH) explores how narratives of the past continue to impact the present and the future of the epidemic. Researchers from Kraków, Warsaw, London, Berlin and Basel, in collaboration with a great many community partner organisations, collected artefacts, archival documents and art works, and conducted oral history interviews with activists, advocates, politicians, bureaucrats and medical practitioners. These lively materials evoke only some of the multiple lives and faces involved in the struggle against HIV/AIDS in the European region. The excerpts from life narratives as presented here, and many more, are part of the European HIV/AIDS Archive.  

Funding for the research that was used to produce this exhibition was generously provided by the Humanities in the European Research Area as part of their 3rd Joint Research Programme under the rubric “Uses of the Past”.

HIVstories: Living Politics was first shown in the Schwules Museum in Berlin in the autumn of 2019 (2019, September 12 – November 11)

Information

HIVstories: Living Politics
31.01—1.03.2020

Tuesday–Sunday 12–8pm

Admission free

Opening: 31.01.2020, godz. 20:00

Organisers: Biennale Warszawa Instytucja Kultury m.st. Warszawy, EUROPACH, Instytut Socjologii Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego

Curatorial team: Zülfukar Çetin, Agata Dziuban, Friederike Faust, Emily Jay Nicholls, Noora Oertel, Todd Sekuler, Justyna Struzik, Alper Turan

Exhibition design: Valerie Assman

Exhibition production: Biennale Warszawa

Exhibition montage: Krzysztof Krawczyński, Antoni Rylke

Poster design: Lidia Wilkosz

With support of: Beate Binder, Peter-Paul Bänziger, Martin Lengwiler, Marsha Rosengarten

Funding: HERA Knowledge Exchange and Impact Award

Media partners: TOK fm, Le Monde Diplomatique, Notes Na 6 Tygodni