HIVstories: ‘Lives Shaped by Politics, Politics Shaped by Lives…’

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"HIVstories: Living Politics" research exhibition can be seen at the venue of queer art and and activism collective Dramaqueer İstanbul Arts Association in Tarlabaşı, Beyoğlu from March 14 to April 10, 2020.

Questioning the ways in which politics and life narratives are entangled in the fields of HIV/AIDS activism, the exhibition 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.

For this exhibition in İstanbul, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu has produced a performance work entitled "there / not there", taking inspiration from Murtaza Elgin, Turkey's first known AIDS case.

In addition to the performance, a series of tours and speeches will be held throughout the exhibition, the dates will be announced later.

The "HIVstories: Living Politics" exhibition, where the output of the European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (EUROPACH) research was presented, opened at the Schwules Museum in Berlin in September 2019. It was exhibited in Warsaw in February 2020.

'They cannot be recounted as a single coherent story'

The curators of the exhibition explains the background of this research exhibition briefly as follows:

The World Health Organisation has identified Europe as a region with the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world. While the impact and spread of the virus unfolds differently and unevenly across the region, it has evoked multiple responses from civil society, religious institutions and European states and governing bodies. 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.

In this context, made up of objects that have been collected over the course of a three-year international research project, the exhibition explores how narratives of the past continue to impact the unfolding of the epidemic.

Researchers from Kraków, London, Berlin and Basel, in collaboration with several community partner organisations, collected artefacts, archival documents and art works, and conducted oral history interviews with activists, advocates, politicians, bureaucrats and medical practitioners.

These materials evoke only some of the multiple lives and faces involved in the struggle against HIV/AIDS in the European region.

Coming to İstanbul after Berlin and Warsaw, the exhibition will be seen in two other European capital cities, namely London and Vienna.

Curators of the exhibition: Emily Jay Nicholls, Noora Oertel, Todd Sekuler, Justyna Struzik, Zülfikar Çetin, Alper Turan

(AÖ/SD)