#aidsactionnow

This year PosterVirus struggled to find its footing. We looked critically at ourselves. We aim to understand our own limitations. How can we challenge the logic of the AIDS industry? What can art posters change? What do people care about in the AIDS response? In a movement divided by identity politics, how do we make sure that voices are being heard (and not only the ones with the privilege to shout the loudest)? Are we just talking to each other - what about all the people around the world who are not (or do not want to be) part of the mainstream HIV discourses?

Due to recent films such as How To Survive a Plague, Dallas Buyers Club and United in Anger, hipsters across North America are flocking to get down with the AIDS movement and embracing some of our lost warriors. We are swimming in nostalgia. As we continue to romanticize the past, is the popular imaginary forgetting that AIDS still impacts us today? Has this created the false appearance that AIDS has made its way back on political agendas?

People are still dying. People still don’t have access to treatment. People don’t have housing. People are increasingly criminalized. People still spread ignorance and hate. And yet mainstream AIDS industry and media suggests that stopping all this is as simple as a "cure". A simple pill to make AIDS go away.

This year we focused on issues of the prison industrial complex, religion, the consequences of being labelled “risky”, the failure of condoms, racism, countering individualization, and challenging heteronormative assumptions. We want to problematize language, poke holes in the way that terms are used and continue hard discussions. We worked with artists Scott Treleavan, Natalie Wood, JJ Levine, Alexis Mitchell, Vincent Chevalier, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Ted Kerr and Chris Jones.

AS LONG AS THERE ARE PRISONS, THERE WILL BE AIDS

Alexis Mitchell

I began to think about my project for Poster Virus through the lens of disclosure - about what it means for different bodies to have to speak and the precarity of speaking out when bodies are already in danger. For me, this culminates in the space of the prison, where those left most vulnerable through acts of disclosure - speaking out and/or staying silent, become embodied in one space/place. Because of this, I use the body of a white, male subject building his fortress in the sand in conjunction with the slogan " As long as there are prisons, there will be AIDS" in order to point to the ways that a homonormative gay agenda further silences, marginalizes and hides behind those consistently affected by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).

This sentiment comes from Dean Spade about the shared experiences of Trans people (specifically trans women of colour) and people living with HIV within the PIC. It is at this moment of confluence, between the fears and real ramifications of disclosing one’s status and disclosing one's assigned gender that becomes unavoidable in thinking about who is incarcerated and who has access to the constant construction and renegotiation of state power.

LOOK AFTER EACH OTHER

Scott Treleaven

YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME

Vincent Chevalier with Ian Bradley-Perrin

“Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes…”

In the slight of hand that weaves the short and long memories of our community with the artifacts that remain and the work we do to alter our near future into our present sense of the blurred lines of our “community,” let us not drop the adaptability that we have always used to keep up with the virus that adapts so well to us. It is not the remembering and it is neither the history, nor the material culture nor the valorization of the battles won and lost that impedes our movement forward, but rather the unpinning of our past from the circumstances from which the fights were born. It is this that makes light of the impetus to resist; the gentrification of our memories and our worshipping of idols whose miracles are forgotten.