The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown took place between the 28 th of June and the 6 th of July and provided both established and green artists alike a forum to showcase their art. Visual and performance art have been important in making HIV/AIDS visible and allow for an engagement with the complex issues that the mainstream media largely ignores.

Positive 2007 , a touring exhibition of visual arts in Grahamstown during the festival, focuses on the use of art as a tool to better understand and face the issues around HIV and AIDS. The focus is also on living with AIDS, not dying of it. But along with this is a strong focus on death as being a part of life and on coming to terms with death.

“The global proliferation of art about AIDS is unprecedented in the history of art, as no other epidemic has spawned so much artistic creation. The reason for this has not been extensively researched but it could be due to the fact that the epidemic, being closely allied to sexuality, politics and the structures of society, has made it subject to artistic expression,” says Carol Brown, curator of Positive 2007 .

There is a deep sense of irony in the title of this exhibition. The artwork by Dineo Seshee Bopape, titled Love Conquers All , which consists of red string lights luridly spelling out the title, is obviously steeped in irony. But there is another layer to this which radiates positivity as connected to a potential healing force.

Some of the art deals with unveiling death and moves it from the periphery into the center, in order to address the fear and taboo set up around it. This is evident in The Bereaved a series of photographs by Pieter Hugo , who won the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist award for 2007 in the photography category. This collection of photographs depicts people in full frontal view, reminiscent of the traditional portrait photograph or painting. However, these people are the recently deceased, and were photographed in the morgue while being prepared for burial. The photographs were taken with consent from the families concerned and are an effort to naturalize death, as well as to explore mourning and bereaved families South Africa .

Another display in the exhibition was the Long Life Body Map project. This project uses the methodology of drawn on body-mapping on life size reams of paper and provides a way for people living with HIV and AIDS to represent themselves. The AIDS 2000 Ribbon is another important community project, displayed in photographs in the Positive 2007 exhibition. The project involved 1000 people drawn from the larger community, including AIDS orphans, school children, art students and community groups.

Other heavy weight artists such as William Kentridge and David Goldblatt participate in this careful, thoughtful and clever exhibition aimed at a new and under-explored area of the AIDS epidemic and the role of art within it.

Apart from Positive 2007, there have also been other initiatives to engage with HIV/AIDS through art and performance in South Africa . DramAidE is an HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention project that uses drama methodologies to work with young people. Another newly launched creative initiative is Drama for Life , a programme spanning over 14 SADC countries that looks to educate, inform and entertain by using theatre as a forum to discuss HIV/AIDS related issues. The programme, run through the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand , is offering 28 scholarships in both performance and teaching capacities.

It is encouraging to see people engaging with these issues in creative and interesting ways, as creative interventions raise critical questions about how we see and respond to the epidemic and also provides a forum for marginalized voices to be heard.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.