You Are Not Alone
LEANDRO ERLICH Puerta, de la serie Access for All, 2004. Colección H+F. Cortesía: Fundació Joan Miró
It seems incredibly that the society we live in still feels such panic and distaste whenever the word AIDS is mentioned. It is even more surprising that this fear leads to such terrible and unjust consequences, such as exclusion, isolation, abandonment and the social rejection experienced by its sufferers, which are unique in this sense. This is what happens, and this is what the show You Are Not Alone seeks to criticise, or at least bring to our attention. The display, curated by Hilde Teerlinck, the director of the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais/Dunkerque, and Irene Aristizábal, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the discovery of HIV, was inaugurated at the Fundación Joan Miró and organised in partnership with the Art Aids Foundation and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (MARCO), where it will subsequently travel.
The ethical courage of Han Nefkens, the founder of Art Aids who, significantly, is HIV+, constitutes the axis around this show revolves, to call to action and to avoid resignation. Because, like he himself tells us in his accepting and brave book Borrowed Time, it is not just the illness that causes fear: the worst is the fear of being alone. And this wound, as a whole and separately, is what is spoken about by the 14 artists whose work is on display. Each in their own way, they reveal, from different angles and perspectives the way in which the social stigma affects sufferers, while some use it as a money-making opportunity, as always, and the patients are treated liked the lepers of the past: driven away from society, out of a fear of infection. The neon by Elmgreen & Dragset with the message AIDS is Good Business for Some, a statement against the pharmaceutical industry, is highly eloquent, as is the reproduction of the Fauno Barberini, a Greek masterpiece, shown here with a transfusion catheter, which highlights both its homoerotic charge and the fear of contaminated blood.
Although at first sight it may all seem innocuous, the viewer gradually becomes more aware of the growing emotional and moral tension, as if the show were a collection of Russian dolls, teetering over the abyss, in order to open up, with a focus on research, to a painful and complex reality. In this sense, three pieces stand out as the foundations of the show: the medium-length film Restricted Sensation by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, a cry against the homophobic law approved by the Lithuanian parliament in 2009; the installation Tkaf by Latifa Echakhch, which criticises the manipulation of information conducted by governmental institutions; and Resource Room by Matthew DarbyShire, a simulacrum of an information point, the end of the journey, which delves into the origin of the stigma through the graphic material from awareness-raising campaigns from the 1980s, and the accounts of HIV+ people living in Barcelona.
Contemplated work by work and as a whole, the display fulfils its main objective: to raise the alarm against discrimination and rejection, and to question our most commonly held prejudices. There are symbolic pieces, such as Nowhere, the theatre curtain by the Cypriot Christodoulos Panayiotou, which has been allegorically folded, never to be unfolded; protest photographs and sculptures which evoke panic. But there are also narrative pieces, such as the series In the time of Aids, or the video by the Chilean artist Lorena Zilleruelo, entitled Pasos, which shows the huge effort made by a woman infected by her late partner, in an exercise of intimacy, approached with extreme honesty. Perhaps this is the most striking element of You Are Not Alone: it takes an honest and intelligent look at the issue of social exclusion, combining criticism with an invitation to reflect, making a protest whilst holding on to the hope for change.
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