Graphic Ephemera Lasting Impact: Building an Online UK HIV/AIDS Design Archive

Historical accounts of HIV/AIDS in the UK seldom look beyond the ”official” government public campaigns or the work of larger London-based organisations. Nor have the graphic output and communication strategies employed by diverse community groups, activists, and small charities during the eighties and nineties been analysed extensively.

Article in On curating, Issue 42: WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT AIDS COULD FILL A MUSEUM: Curatorial ethics and the ongoing epidemic in the 21st Century. Published online and in print format.

This issue focuses on HIV, culture and curation, edited by scholar and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr. The print and online issue features over 40 contributions—including essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints, and personal reflections—from artists, activists, academics, and writers from around the world, exploring AIDS-related culture in the 21st century, through four themes: forgetting, seeing, collecting, and making, all of which reflect on both the historical turn in contemporary AIDS cultural production, and the ongoing need to keep an eye on the present.