Artists, Scientists Collaborate In Art Exhibition Focused On HIV

Artists and scientists have worked together to create pieces of art now on display in Munich, Germany in conjunction with the International AIDS Conference. The exhibition, titled HIV Science As Art, was conceived by co-curators Jessica Whitbread and Daniel Cordner. It follows in the footsteps of their 2023 show that was on display a year ago during the IAS Conference on HIV Science in Brisbane Australia.

The art will be for sale and all proceeds will be used to support community-based HIV programs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. But the impact of the show extends beyond raising money for worthwhile organizations. The exhibition also challenges viewers to think more deeply about important biomedical and social issues.

One artist/scientist pair worked together to create a piece on vaccine hesitancy. Charles Ryan Long is a Chicago-based artist and long-time HIV/AIDS activist. He partnered with Dr. Heidi Larson, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Their piece is entitled, “The Roots of (dis)Trust.”

Khairullah Rahim, an artist based in Singapore, collaborated with Ali Raza Khan, an HIV activist in Pakistan. Their piece, “Penjaga Hutan Batu (Guardian of the Stone Jungle),” is a short video ostensibly about pigeons. But Khairullah noted that the pigeons represent so much more. These birds often are vilified as carriers of disease. Too often, he remarked, people living with HIV are similarly vilified.

Both artists remarked that the collaborations with their science partners grew very organically. Long commented that when he was speaking with Dr. Larson about her work on vaccine hesitancy, the idea came quickly. “This is about trust,” he said. “It came to me rather easily and then it was just about how to transfer that idea.”

Rahim had similar thoughts about his collaboration. The process, “was very spontaneous. We wanted to see where the experimentation would bring us. There was no very clear end product that we were interested in.”

The exhibition has been supported by the pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare and Münchner Aids-Hilfe, an organization supporting people living with HIV in the Munich region since 1984. Works of art are on display at Brainlab, Olof-Palme-Straß 9 in Munich through July 25, 2024. The exhibition is open to the public daily from 10:00 AM until 7:00 PM local time.