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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Fiona Anderson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
This article traces a history of Living Proof (1991-2), a collaborative, multidisciplinary arts project produced with diverse communities living with HIV/AIDS across the North East of England. The workshops, exhibitions, and performances produced as part of Living Proof (and in response to it) engaged directly with racialised and gendered experiences of UK HIV/AIDS care, addiction, the prison system, and the radical power of international solidarity with AIDS activists and cultural producers in North America, including Pomo Afro Homos and the so-called NEA Four. One of the artists involved, Nicholas Lowe, said later that Living Proof was possible partly ‘because nobody was looking’ so far north. The history of Living Proof speaks to the distinctive funding, galleries, festival and community networks in the region in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is an overlooked but vital part of UK AIDS histories. At the same time, attempting to uncover this forgotten corner of UK AIDS cultural production and engage with it as neglected and distinctively regional necessitates careful reflection on the politics of northern identity and British HIV/AIDS historiography. In this article, I trace a history of the project, drawing on its scattered archive and conversations with those involved, and think critically about what it might mean to historicise it now, as British art responding to art and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and after receives greater scholarly attention, and in the thick of economic and political crisis.
Author(s): Anderson F
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: British Art Studies
Year: 2025
Issue: 27
Online publication date: 14/07/2025
Acceptance date: 03/11/2024
Date deposited: 15/07/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2058-5462
Publisher: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art
URL: https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-27/fanderson
DOI: 10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-27/fanderson
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