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Train the Trainer Workshop 28 February ? 2 March 2006

HIVAN?s ?Artists Action Around AIDS? (AAAA) programme focuses on the role that the visual arts can play in addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The programme has diversified to include Highly Effective Art (HEART) . Ever mindful of the need to touch infected and affected communities in a very direct way, the HEART project focuses on participatory workshops and exhibitions created by communities infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

The workshop will include training of art-focused persons, who work empathetically with children and youth, in the strengthening and emotionally expressive potential of art making, also the implementation of these skills in workshops with children.

The workshop is an adaptation of the ?train the trainer approach? which first seeks to mobilize trained art-workers in utilizing their skills for the benefit of infected and affected communities in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and second, mentors these art-workers so that they can apply their professional skills to the development of child friendly programmes to educate orphans and vulnerable children on issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. However, trainers would also impart leadership skills and knowledge to participants, equipping them through this process to become key leaders in their communities through active participation.

Overall Objectives of the Workshop Process:

• Develop and extend the expertise of art and child care professionals engaged in creative work with children.

• To utilise the skills and experience of art professionals to effectively participate in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
• Provide an environment for free personal expression through the medium of various art forms, facilitated by trained personnel.

• To provide children with the techniques for artistic reflection and translation into the challenges and complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS.

• To provide a therapeutic experience for children in need and t o mobilize the communities response to HIV/AIDS.

Projected Outcomes:

The end result of the project would be to strengthen the role played by childcare workers and art specialists in KwaZulu-Natal and beyond, thereby qualitatively improving interventions with vulnerable children. Furthermore, the project will provide for the transferral of skills that will contribute to the creation of empathetic environments where vulnerable children will benefit directly from the psychodynamic processes implicit in participatory creativity.

Beneficiaries would include, community-based education and HIV/AIDS organisations in rural and urban communities as well as hospital school programmes and arts organisations that wish to develop children?s art workshops.

For more information on the Train the Trainer Workshop, please click here

Body Mapping Workshop 20-24 March 2006

The Highly Effective Art Programme (HEART) contributes to the development of a culture of human rights and a better dispensation for communities touched by HIV and AIDS. In this light, the body mapping workshop would focus on youth and adults affected and infected by HIV and AIDS. The project will draw participants from diverse communities, in particular from the HIV/AIDS support groups and clinics mentioned below.

A call for participants has been made to these support groups, clinics and communities. Project information and presentations on the body mapping process are also being provided to the support group steering committees. Following this, potential participants will be interviewed, with the selected participants taking ownership of the initial planning processes. While previous body mapping initiatives involved predominately women, we would encourage equal gender representation.

Problems and issues the proposed project will address:

HEART forges links with cultural organisations that advocate for change. The programme activities are designed to give voice to cultural understandings around HIV/AIDS, enhance local conceptualisations of complex biomedical issues around HIV, and provide meaningful opportunities for engaged discussion within and by communities around the pandemic. The programme is particularly concerned with encouraging local community participation, and therefore strives to locate its activities in areas that will enable local accessibility. ?

A common theme in the elements depicted in the body maps was the alienation of participants from the medical aspects of their treatments. Patient driven health management requires an understanding of the often complicated bio-medical factors at work in the body, and the body maps are a vehicle that bridges the divide between the medical and social indicators of a disease that is rooted in social (sexual) activity and bio-medical in origin.These complex human stories constitute a history that is being lost more often that it is recorded.

Body mapping has the potential to intervene on many levels:

• Personal: Body mapping is primarily a tool of personal growth, healing and expression.
• Public awareness: Exhibiting or otherwise publishing the body maps provides a window into a world of experience that nurtures respect, dignity and understanding.
• Political advocacy: The stories ?told? by body maps reflect and lobby issues surrounding treatment, policy, and law. They provide powerful statements of the successes and failures of political will and access to human rights.
• Therapeutic: Creative challenges and self-expression are one aspect of the body mapping process, ?ownership? of often misunderstood and mysterious (bio-medial) treatments and the functioning of the body also generate self worth and positive approaches to health psychology.
• Educational: Body mapping requires the transfer of knowledge, for the participant, the mentor artist and for the viewer. Health, nutrition, virology, immunology, and narrative history are explored with creativity and imagination.
• Research: Body maps give subjective expression to the bio-medical aspects of PWA. By definition the maps also provide a physical (visual) expression of ideas, memories, feelings and emotions that speak directly to the experiences of the artists/subjects. The maps are a valuable heuristic tool, which serves to mirror the relationships between medical and social researchers, which in turn determines the effectiveness of multi-disciplinary intent.

For more information on the Body Mapping workshop, please click here

AAAA Helps Out With Canadian School HIV/AIDS Campaign

Following e-mail correspondence with the Artists Action Around AIDS team, Kyla Brophy, a learner at Windsor Secondary in North Vancouver, Canada, developed an interactive activity that saw learners create a wall of hands each with comments reflecting an understanding of the pandemic, says Kyla ?A lot of progress was made, because?HIV/AIDS doesn't really affect North American youth at all.? At the beginning of the week they?wrote moronic things like 'people have sex with monkeys and get HIV/AIDS'?but by the end they were?coming back to write 'we can make a difference' and 'I?know how to protect?myself'.??It felt like a?minor breakthrough.?? Below is a write up from the school's magazine.

AIDS Week

More than 40 million people are HIV positive, and the Windsor Interact Club decided to take action. From November 14 th to 18 th, the Interact Club spread awareness about HIV/AIDS through a week long campaign. Student seminar leaders went to all the Planning 10 classes to lead activities to promote knowledge and awareness on how to live a healthy and safe lifestyle. Everyday at lunch, Windsor students ?lent a hand? by making a donation and tracing their hand for a school wide art project. The week wrapped up with a 30 hour fast to raise money for African AIDS Programs. $1,000 was donated to the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

NOTES:

• Windsor Secondary is in North Vancouver Canada.
• The Interact Club is a school service club, currently the largest club in the school, chaired by Kyla Brophy.
• Other Interact projects include adopting endangered species, sponsoring a Guatemalan high school student, volunteering for local charities, and providing food and supplies to an orphanage for handicapped Kenyan children.
• Planning 10 is a class that teaches career and life skills to 15 year olds. Most of the 15 year olds thought that you HIV/AIDS was curable and could be contracted by holding hands.
• AIDS Week was featured in two local newspapers, the North Shore News, and the North Shore Outlook.

HEART/AAAA General Information

The vision of the Highly Effective Art and Artists Action around AIDS Programmes is to contribute to the development of a culture of human rights and a better dispensation for communities touched by HIV and AIDS and to magnify the role of the cultural arts and cultural/community responses to the issues and challenges surrounding the HIV pandemic.

The AAAA and HEART programmes focus on interventions that bridge the divide between the social and bio-medical aspects of HIV/AIDS and contribute to public awareness and the empowerment of affected and infected communities. The emphasis is on the transferral of information using the cultural arts as a tool for communication and advocacy. The projects open and interrogate a dialogue between the public, bio-medical, social and behavioural aspects of HIV/AIDS. Towards this end AAAA and HEART develop exhibitions, catalogues, presentations, publications, forums, developmental workshops and forge links with cultural organisations that advocate for change. AAAA develops and curates exhibitions that reflect and mirror the history and challenges particular to HIV/AIDS in South Africa, thereby serving to document the often lost and forgotten human face of HIV/AIDS. HEART gives communities and artists a voice through participatory and training workshops.

Community Artists play an important role in depicting the ?physical face? of AIDS and are committed to archiving, documenting, exploring and expressing the human condition. The personal and collective psychology surrounding HIV/AIDS reflect the contradictions and paradoxes of a disease that on the one hand evokes fear, stigma, alienation, and isolation but also manifests emotional and social responses of celebration, courage, determination, hope, faith, and social upliftment.

The languages of the arts, versatile and creative as they are, cross boundaries of culture, language, literacy and religious belief. Not surprisingly, collaborations between visual artists, the media, performing artists and educationists have resulted in effective projects and campaigns that highlight the issues and myths surrounding HIV/AIDS.

Central to the real development of ?artists acting around AIDS? is the need to re-open the debate that art is more than a mere tool for social activism. Art for arts sake has the power to transform life.

Against this backdrop of immense human challenge and suffering, the cultural arts evoke and express the subtleties of human perception and experience and the collective and universal nature of human emotion.

A humanistic view of the world suggests that knowledge and understanding must be acquired by engaging with a world of meaning, values and emotions. Experiential art making engages these faculties and awakens growth potential that is healing, commemorative and life affirming. Integration of body and mind, acceptance, forgiveness, loss and grief are archetypal human progressions not unfamiliar to the language of art - sight; hearing; thought; memories; ideas; beliefs; attitudes; touch; smell; taste; feelings and dreams.

Art as an existential, humanising force gives voice to the ?un-seeable? - that is, the spirit or the soul. As mirrors of the soul the arts are rather like waking dreams. They embody what it means to truly embrace a culture of human dignity and strive towards the unification of intent that binds our global destinies. Culture advocates for life.

The Highly Effective Art Programme, and the many initiatives that have emanated from it, collectively comprise one of HIVAN?s truly unique contributions to the struggle against HIV and AIDS. These have all been developed and implemented on the basis of small-scale funding which, by and large, has been raised by those involved on a project-by-project basis.

Highly Effective Art focuses on interventions that bridge the divide between the social and biomedical aspects of HIV/AIDS and contribute to public awareness and the empowerment of affected and infected communities. This programme evolved from a highly successful Artists Action around AIDS Campaign in mid-2003, and now encompasses art-related campaigns, commemorative and other exhibitions, a variety of developmental participatory workshops and educational fora. The programme facilitates the production of publications such as the Children?s Resource Booklet series, which messages children?s diagnosis through the publication of books authored by children for consumption by children. HEART forges links with cultural organisations that advocate for change. The programme activities are designed to give voice to cultural understandings around HIV/AIDS, enhance local conceptualisations of complex biomedical issues around HIV, and provide meaningful opportunities for engaged discussion within and by communities around the pandemic. The programme is particularly concerned with encouraging local community participation, and therefore strives to locate its activities in areas that will enable local accessibility.

HEART and AAAA anchors its programmes on the following goals:

• Giving artistic reflection, translation and presentation to the challenges and complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS through development and facilitation of experiential workshops for HIV-positive youth and adults.
• Educating through art via public presentations and participatory fora that showcase the outputs of the above, and through production of resources and publications that identify cultural responses to HIV/AIDS.
• Providing a platform for self-advocacy and expression by those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS by recording, documenting and archiving the human stories of living with HIV/AIDS

Major artistic achievements of the Highly Effective Art (HEART) and Artists Action Around AIDS (AAAA) Programmes. (June 2004 ? October 2005)

Project: Artists? Action Around AIDS Exhibition, June ? August 2004.
Description: A large-scale group exhibition of contemporary art works that explored the issues and challenges surrounding HIV and AIDS.
Partners: Siyazama Project; Artists For Humanity; African Art Centre; Memory Box Project; Tatham Art Gallery Pietermaritzburg 22 June - 29 August 2004.
This exhibition opened at the Durban Art Gallery in 2003.

Project: AAAA NGO Booth:XV International AIDS Conference, Bangkok, Thailand, July 2004.
Description: An NGO exhibition booth spotlighting HIVAN and, in particular, a m ulti-media digital presentation of the Artists? Action Around AIDS (AAAA) exhibition and developmental workshops. The stall provided a platform for and an opportunity to proactively raise awareness of the role of the arts in the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

Project: phila impilo (Live Life), June ? August 2005.
Description: A series of developmental, participatory photography workshop with men and women who were traine d in basic photography techniques. Participants then used customised photo-voice techniques to document their own lives. This culminated in an exhibition of photographs accompanied by narrative stories which were displayed in the Sinikithemba Chapel, McCord Hospital.
Partners: Sinikithemba Care Centre ( McCord Hospital); Veronica Wilson (VSO, UK); Andr? ?Budgie? Smith. Volunteer participants, Sinikithemba Care Centre.

Project:Children?s rights and community voices, August ? October 2004.
Description: A mixed-media arts and crafts exhibition and developmental craft workshops. The exhibition included: ?Children?s Visions & Voices: Rights and Realities in SA - a participatory photographic exhibition presented by the Children?s Rights Centre?; and sculptural beaded tableaux from the Siyazama Project documenting community responses to HIV/AIDS. Developmental workshops with crafters from the Mtubatuba area were facilitated by Siyazama in Durban.
Partners: The Africa Centre; Children?s Rights Centre; Alex Fattall; Siyazama Craft Development Project.

Project:Festival of Hope and Healing ? September 2004.
Description: A week-long multi-media HIV and AIDS cultural arts festival featuring student participation in the construction of collaborative public art works. The programme featured a drama, Carpe diem, Say What you Do, a music concert in the park and a film festival. A Visual Arts Exhibition was displayed in Shepstone Building at Howard College, at the Hexagon Theatre, PMB and at the Library Concourse, Edgewood Campus.
Partner: University of KwaZulu-Natal AIDS Programme.

Project:I got the message: HIV and AIDS life stories, fiction and poems from KwaZulu-Natal schools (ISBN 0-620-33140-3), September 2004.
Description: Anthology of writings about HIV and AIDS by children aged 7-17 years .
Partners: ELITS (Education, Library, Information, and Technology Services) ; KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education; Creative Workshops; and Media in Education Trust.

Project: Art For Expression (Job Shadow Exchange), November 2004
Description : Facilitation, selection and placement of three matched pairs of job shadow participants in arts-based work with children affected by HIV and AIDS, including engagement in the ?Art for Expression? workshops . Participants were selected from organisations involved in the proactive development of art programmes with vulnerable children.
Partners: Training Arts Programme (Natal Society of Art); God?s Golden Acre; Siyaya; Christian Medical Relief Services; Hlabisa HIV/AIDS Drop-In Centre ; African Art Centre.

Project: Art For Expression (D evelopmental training and participatory workshops), November 2004.
Description: Trainee workshop to enhance the skills of young people working with HIV-affected children, especially in art-based activities. This culminated in a two-day participatory art workshop by the trainees for 35 children selected from the Sinikithemba Care Centre support group. The process was facilitated and mentored by experienced participatory and developmental practitioners.
Partners: Professor Karen Malone (HIVAN Research Fellow, RMIT University, Australia); Lauren Cobham ( VSO, UK); Neith Moore (Art Therapy Specialist / Durban Girls High School); Professor Claudia Mitchell (Education, UKZN); Sinikithemba Care Centre ( McCord Hospital); Koinonia Conference Centre; Camp Bambanani.

Project: HIVAN Child and Youth Research Forum Series, November 2004.
Description: A multidisciplinary forum series drawing from biomedical and social science research and interventions in the field of HIV and AIDS with a focus on, and some participation by, children and youth.
Partner: Lauren Cobham (VSO, UK).

Project : University of KwaZulu ? Natal, Student Orientation Programme, February 2005.
Description: Participatory , public art, collaborative installations.
Donor/Funder: HIVAN, University of KwaZulu ? Natal.

Project: World Council on Religion and Peace (WCRP) and HIVAN Youth Forum, March ? September 2005.
Description: P articipatory forums (three) for young learners on life skills development through cultural art interventions.

Project: Children?s Resource Book Series and participatory art workshops, April ? September 2005.
Description: Participatory art workshop were run on three weekends, through these seven HIV positive children created a storyboard using art and drama methods describing how the HI Virus works in the body and their own life experiences. The objectives of the project and the workshops are to create a series of storybooks that aid disclosure and represent both an intervention approach and supportive tool through its distribution and process.
Project Partners: Sinikithemba HIV/AIDS Care Centre, McCord Hospital, Durban and Lauren Cobham (VSO, UK).

The HEART/AAAA team was pleased to contribute to the following forums:

Art for Expression Presentation, January 13/31 2005: This presentation was a follow up on the Art for Expression training programme and was designed to showcase to McCord Hospital and Sinikithemba Care Centre clinical and psycho ? social staff the implications of using art therapy with vulnerable children.

Children?s Resource Book Series Presentation, March 14/17, 2005: Two presentations, firstly to the McCord Hospital clinical staff, and second with the parents and child guardians, gave voice to the aims and process that underpin the need for child authored materials that message the lived experience of HIV diagnosis and treatment.

?HIVAN Internal Forum Presentation, July 7 2005: This presentation gave insight into the core project process of the Children?s Resource Book Series. The presentation included detailed information on the methodology used, a visual journal of the workshops using photographs and dialogue, and an introduction to the layout of the ?Living With HIV? book which included an exhibition of the children?s artworks.

Medical Research Council of South Africa, HIV/AIDS Forum, 25 October, Durban, 27 October, Mtunzini: ?The Power of Children?s Voices - Participatory approaches to living with HIV and AIDS?. The presentation focused on the Children?s Resource Book Series, specifically the use of creative participatory art making techniques.

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Children's Conceptual Art

By Malene Sahlertz - HIVAN Intern, August to November 2004. Masters Student: International Development Studies and Educational Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark.

Introduction

This discussion, presented at an internal HIVAN Forum on 9th September 2003, preceded HIVAN?s ?Art for Expression? project and formed part of the deliberations around the interpretation and understanding of children?s art outputs and their motivations for art making. The ?Art for Expression? project was a collaborative initiative and the art making with children was used as a valuable tool, serving multiple purposes. Besides providing the children with space for active engagement with art, promoting child-centred participation, immersion and reflection, the children?s art products were also considered to provide valuable entrances into the children?s lived realities. This was especially due to the fact that the theme for the workshop, presented to the children, was ?your childhood?. Through this theme, the children were asked to picture their lived realities by means of collages, drawings, and outdoor art structures. Their end products can, therefore, be understood as the children?s direct reflections of their lives and realities. The topic of HIV and AIDS was not introduced to the children nor emphasized as central in the project although it was known that a number of the children were HIV-affected. It was decided that if children were aware that HIV and AIDS affected their lives and wanted to portray this, they would do so.

Understanding children?s conceptual drawings

Getting an insight into children?s worlds doesn?t necessarily imply that children portray their immediate realities. In this presentation I elaborate on how to understand the realities that children convey through their drawings when they are not asked to picture their concrete lived experiences but are given a more conceptual theme.

Here I must first stop, as the humanist I am, and look at my own terminology: reality. I have mentioned it a few times without defining the term. Without going too much into a definition, which could lead to a presentation on its own, I find that it is important to be aware of the fact that the notion of reality is a highly complex one. One could even argue, speaking from a social constructionist perspective, that reality, as an objective quantity, is non-existent. Reality always relies on individual and collective interpretations and representations of the physical world. In this sense too, representations conveyed through various forms of media, for instance visual media, constitutes adults? and children?s realities; how they understand the world.

Linguistic language, among others, can be seen from this perspective as a means for people to make sense of, and order the world, and in that way shape a reality ( Gardner 1985). Art can likewise be comprehended as an additional, alternative language, with the same potential for people to make sense of the world.

One of the strengths entailed in using both languages in combination when assessing children?s worlds is that they have the potential of supplementing each other. Extra perspective can be added to what is being said or pictured and sometimes even alternative meanings of children?s ordering and sense-making of the world can be created.

In the process of making sense of the world, the child theoretician Jean Piaget emphasizes that art-making, which in this context can be comprehended as in line with play, is not about assimilating the self into reality but rather about assimilating reality into the needs of the self.

These points create an interesting perspective when attempting to comprehend children?s drawings. They entail an approach that focuses on the special way in which children make sense of the world through their linguistic and artistic representations and on how they might borrow from certain fictional representations in their sense-making. By this I mean that they might bring in experiences that they have not had at first hand. They might incorporate images from, for instance, visual media such as movies, magazines, and the like. While we note these external images, as Piaget reminds us, we must bear in mind that the drawings will also be shaped by, and reveal, specific needs of the child in some way.

?Reading? children?s conceptual drawings

The above points can be exemplified by discussing some pictures from the book: ?If I had the chance?? published by the Asian Development Bank.

The book exhibits drawings of Asian street children (and children from resource poor families) who participated in a drawing competition. They were to illustrate what they would do ?if they had the chance?. The drawings were created within a conceptual framework, and must thus be understood slightly differently from art works by children who have been asked to picture their ?real lives?.

Picture 1

Picture 1: A boy meeting his father (p.20). There is nothing really striking from the text alone; it probably would be possible for him to meet his father. But when you consider all the elements of the drawing as well, you have the strong sense that this picture would never reflect a realistic future scenario. It merely pictures a fictional vision, a daydream. You sense inspiration from a Hollywood or Bollywood reunion scene between father and son.

I believe this inner vision that the boy has reflected is his way of dealing with an absent father. He portrays an affectionate father figure who has been distant, but probably because has been doing something important. The planes represent being far away and the likelihood of the father engaging in something big and important because it costs money to fly; an air ticket is probably far more expensive than an average citizen of Ulan Bator can afford. Through these images, the boy creates the opportunity of legitimising the father?s absence for himself, and he reinforces and enables himself to cling to an image of a father figure he so strongly needs or desires.

The need for committed and affectionate father figures in boys? lives and their legitimisations of the absence of fathers are also reflected in Social Anthropologist Jill Kruger?s studies of street children. Despite the fact that street children might have no previous knowledge about their fathers, Kruger found that they went to great lengths to legitimise their absence (Conversation with Kruger, 26.10.2004).

The children?s means of making sense of the world in their drawings published in this book, often reflect idyllic notions such as can be seen in this picture. From our adult perspective of their life situation we envisage that they are unlikely to have ever had the experiences portrayed and they are not likely to experience them in the future. As explained earlier, we draw our assessments from a combination of fragments of lived experiences and visual or non-visual fictions.

Picture 2

Picture 2: A girl?s comment (p.14): I would stop people from smoking and drinking and selling other people? This picture illustrates strongly for me first of all, the girl?s sense-making of the world, rather than a reflection of her first hand lived experiences in the world.

A clear dualism is being portrayed here: urban moral decay versus rural moral integrity of living. Concerning the urban decay depicted, one could question at what level it expresses the artist?s experiences and on what level it reflects her own personally created stereotype. The same could be said of her illustration of rural life. The rural comes to signify first and foremost a romantic symphony of marriage, family and the traditional. The alternative of urban life is characterised by a pre-modern fairytale-inspired social order, far removed from reality. Once again, this image could easily have been taken from a Bollywood movie.

What is depicted in the picture reflects the lived experiences of the girl to a lesser extent than it reflects the notions of right and wrong in her personal world. In other words, the picture illustrates the normative perspective of the girl?s world. Here we can see once again how the drawing supplements the text, adding to the linguistic statement that defines the drawing.

In children?s positioning of themselves, drawings also supplement the meaning of a linguistic statement:

Picture 3

Picture 3: ?I would go to school? (p.21): This drawing has nothing to with school; instead it pictures the girl totally alone, small, unhappy, and poor (consider her patched dress). To me, it expresses the girl?s sense of powerlessness and isolation and through this, the girl?s fragile situation and position in the world.

When we look as children?s depiction of schools we find an interesting phenomenon?

Picture (set) 4: Four depictions of: ?If I had a Chance ... I would be a Teacher? (p.14): School is depicted by a number of children as a gathering of peers, thus we conclude that children find it offers human camaraderie rather than isolation. This is especially striking since the accompanying title for many of the drawings relates to the child?s wish to become a teacher; yet there is no teacher in any of the pictures. I would argue that this reflects strong meanings attached to attending school. For me, the pictures reflect first and foremost a sense of collectivity (or desire for communality) and order in the child?s world. This could suggest that the meanings associated with going to school are other than just learning. I believe that there is a sense of togetherness, participation, order and security

Picture 4

associated with belonging associated with this context and that it is indirectly emphasised in these pictures.

The use of art as expression for children in the context of HIV and AIDS is still little explored. Becoming aware of the complexity of meanings enshrined in these drawings of children living under difficult circumstances in Asian cities, should assist us to approach the reading of drawings by children affected by HIV and AIDS with greater care.

References

Gardner, Howard. 1985. Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books

The purpose of the ?Art for Expression? project was to increase capacity among artists and care givers who work with vulnerable children, including those who are HIV-affected. The intention was to increase understanding of the way in which children use art to express emotions and feelings. Artistic expression can be curative when it relieves children?s emotional and mental distress. (Jill Kruger, Project Principal: Art for Expression)

If I Had the Chance ... Artwork from the Streets of Asia and the Pacific . 2004. Asian Development Bank. ISBN: 971-561-502-3 $30.00 (softcover) $90.00 (hardcover) http://www.adb.org/Publications/default.asp

Illustrations reproduced with permission from the Asian Development Bank . For more information on development in Asia and the Pacific, see www.adb.org

The Africa Centre - Visual Arts Exhibition Exploring Children's Rights and Community Voice through Artists' Action Around AIDS

The Africa Centre in Mtubatuba will be hosting a visual arts exhibition exploring children's rights and community voices through Artists' Action Around AIDS. HIVAN's Bren Brophy will be curating the exhibition, opening on 20 August 2004. To download an invitation, please click here

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Scenes from the 2003 Artists' Action Around AIDS Campaign can be viewed here

"Artists' Action Around AIDS" - Visual Arts Exhibition - Reportback

Background

"Artists Action Around AIDS" (AAAA) was conceived as an awareness and developmental project that would focus on the Cultural Arts. Towards this HIVAN convened a developmental workshop for post-graduate students, artists and arts administrators (University of Natal, 04 August 2003), hosted a special performance by Pieter-Dirk Uys "Foreign AIDS" (Sneddon Theatre, 04 August 2003), and curated a large scale Visual Arts Exhibition for presentation at the:

• Durban Art Gallery 25 July - 25 September 2003
• The Africa Centre, Mtubatuba 16 October - 29 November 2003
• The Tatham Art Gallery Pietermaritzburg 22 June - 29 August 2004

The exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery was made possibly financially through assistance from the Gallery; the Africa Centre and Tatham Art Gallery presentations were made possible by generous sponsorship from the Artists For Human Rights Trust.

This report follows the successful presentation of the Exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery, and reports on that at the Africa Centre, Mtubatuba, prior to the presentation at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg.

The Africa Centre

The Africa Centre is situated near Mtubatuba on the R618, en route to Hlabisa in the Somkhele-Hlabisa District of KwaZulu-Natal, about three-and-a-half hours from Durban. The Centre was developed and is maintained in collaboration with the University of KwaZulu - Natal and the Medical Research Council and is funded by the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom).

Situated in a densely populated but essentially rural area, the complex is a focus for community activities and meetings, and is accessible to the local community. Local and international researchers visit the centre, which hosts numerous seminars and workshops. Opening the "Artists Action Around AIDS" exhibition in this rural area contributes to HIVAN's commitment to bringing the exhibition to a diverse audience many of whom would not have access to inner city Galleries and other venues.

The "physical face of AIDS" can be traced in many instances to the dedicated attention of artists as an expression of their broader commitment to archiving, documenting, exploring and expressing the human condition. The AAAA exhibition reflects these concerns by featuring:

• The Rural women's craft development project "Siyazama" (Beaded dolls and sculptures).
• "Sezenjani Ngengculazi?" - What are we doing about AIDS? - Works from the African Art Centre, prints by William Zulu, beaded doll tableaux by Lobolile Ximba.
• "Paper Prayers" - AIDS awareness through the art of printmaking and embroidery.
• "Living Openly" portrait project - Black and white photographic exhibition (31 portraits with accompanying text). The works document the images (portraits) and perspectives (interviews) of HIV positive South Africans who are living openly with HIV/AIDS. Initiated by The Beyond Awareness Campaign.
• "Body maps/memory books" - Fourteen large body tracings made by HIV positive women who use the "maps" to depict distress memories. The works were specially reproduced on vinyl for the Africa Centre exhibition.
• 50 small scale acrylic paintings - Collaborative works by Anya Subotzky and Libuseng Potsane, that sensitively document the illness, treatment and death of Libuseng's first child, who was born HIV positive.
• The HIV/AIDS Billboard Print portfolio - Presented by Artists for Human Rights. Twenty works on paper by artists from Britain, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique.
• "Condom Coat" - A large-scale sculptural installation by artist Fiona Kirkwood, created from hundreds of condoms.

Aims and Objectives

The purpose of the "Artists Action Around AIDS" initiative is to explore the role of the cultural arts in the struggle against the pandemic, while intrinsically reassessing the language of the cultural arts as a dynamic force. The intention is not only to ensure a better dispensation for infected and affected communities (through social and political change and education) but also to provide a means of understanding, exploration, healing, growth and transformation.

More direct aims of the Exhibition are:

• to give artistic reflection, translation and presentation to the challenges and complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS;
• to educate through art;
• to enlighten and sensitise viewers/the public/communities by identifying cultural components in addressing HIV/AIDS;
• to give voice to the cultural dynamics of the HIV/AIDS pandemic;
• to provide a platform for expression;
• to magnify the impact and role played by the Visual Arts in the politics and dynamics of HIV/AIDS, and the link between the cultural arts and the scientific community;
• to inspire creativity and commitment.

Results

The expressed "end result" of the exhibition in the AAAA funding proposal was to "bring the exhibition to a wide and diverse audience". Text about each artwork and the participating organisations was presented, in most cases, in isiZulu and English.

Beneficiaries were envisaged as: school learners, community based education and HIV/AIDS programme personnel and members of rural communities whose access to the contemporary Visual Arts is limited.

Towards this end, the AAAA Exhibition coincided with activities in and around the Africa Centre namely:

• October 17th : External Event : Umkhanyakude Municipality : Pre-Hearing - Comprising 30 local attendees
• October 21st : Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs - Comprising 20 Regional and Deputy Managers and senior officials from around South Africa.
• October 23rd to 24th : Mental Health and HIV Awareness workshop - Comprising 50 local and international participants accommodated in Mtubatuba, Facilitated by Linda Richter and Mike Bennish (Director)
• October 23rd to October 24th : Visit of U.K.Teachers to the Africa Centre - Comprising 30 international teachers visiting schools/sites and the Africa Centre. Facilitated by Rhana/Mdu/Dudu (Communications and Outreach). AIDS related with children-PAF
• October 27th to 31st : ISAB - Comprising the biannual congregation of our International Scientific Advisory Board. Facilitated by Mike Bennish
• November 11th to 14th : Visit of Vietnamese Delegation - Comprising a group of 15 Vietnamese Professors scheduled to more about our GIS, and including a visit to the Africa Centre. Facilitated by Kobus/Tinofa/Rhana
• November 18th to 21st : SQL Workshop - Comprising a major international workshop lasting 5 days and comprising 30 participants from all over the world. Facilitated by Kobus/Sam/ Rhana

In addition to the above, formal events, the Africa Centre is the focus of many community activities and meetings. Its facilities are in constant use and they include a small restaurant. There is constant traffic of local residents and visitors who are attracted to the innovative design (and cool interior!) of the building.

Apart from the free flow of visitors through the exhibition, the Exhibition Curator, Bren Brophy, made two trips to the Centre to maintain the exhibition and to train staff there in "walkabout" tours so as to enable them to take visitors on subsequent informal "walkabouts".

There was an overwhelmingly positive response to the Exhibition and the Director of the Centre, Mike Bennish, has requested further exhibitions that focus on social interventions.

Given the fact that the exhibition showcases the endeavours of organisations active in the HIV/AIDS and Human Rights arena, it is clear that a wide range of organisational aims and objectives were supported through the promotion and networking capacity of the exhibition.

The "Artists Action Around AIDS" exhibition actively promotes and develops the capacity for artists to intervene in the HIV/AIDS pandemic by way of education, advocacy and awareness. As such the project promotes and reflects the principal aims of the Artists for Human Rights Trust, namely to promote, develop and encourage artists and artistic endeavour, specifically in the visual arts, in South Africa, as well as to promote the use of the arts in creating a human rights culture and in fostering human rights education in South Africa.

The issues surrounding HIV/AIDS directly impact the development of a human rights culture in South Africa in that stigma, stereotyping and ignorance underpin the inequalities and discrimination faced by infected and affected communities. The exhibition engages artists and communities towards a better understanding and knowledge of these issues.

The Directors of HIVAN and the Curator of the AAAA Exhibition believe that presenting "Artists Action Around AIDS" at the Africa Centre significantly advanced the above aims and ideals. All anticipate the next stage of the project (Tatham Art Gallery, PMB) with keen pleasure and wish to express appreciation for the opportunity offered by the Artists for Human Rights Trust, through their financial support. It made the showcasing of the Exhibition possible.

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Struggle, the beloved artist

By Mike van Graan

(ArtWit column, Mail & Guardian 5-11 December 2003 - republished with kind permission)

Culture as a weapon of struggle is back. It's a bit more grown-up. And its practitioners probably will not like the label. But it's here. And not a moment too soon.

The struggle against apartheid was a struggle for human dignity, for life, for democracy, for non-racialism, for gender equality, for a nw morality premised on the greater social good.

That struggle is still with us. All that has changed are the conditions under which this struggle is being waged. And nowhere is this clearer than in the AIDS movement. For the struggle of people living with HIV/AIDS, their families, their friends and supporters, is a struggle for human dignity, for life, for democracy, for non-racialism, for gender equality, for a new morality.

The protest art parallels with the Eighties are astonishing. There are new freedom songs. There are AIDS exhibitions, AIDS poetry evening, AIDS plays, AIDS film festivals. Art auctions for some worthy AIDS cause. AIDS craft projects to support people living with HIV. Artists are being called upon to use their influence to mobilise support for this struggle. There's a huge international concert to raise awareness and funds for this struggle, except that this time, it doesn't happen in London, but right here among us. And there's the patron saint of the struggle, Nelson Mandela, leading from the front yet again.

Just like the Eighties, one's social and artistic life is increasingly connected in some way to "the struggle". Attend the launch of Zapiro's latest cartoon compilation and this modest mensch is donating the evening's proceedings (matched by his publishers, Double Storey) to the Treatment Action Campaign's (TAC) treatment project. The funds raised that night would pay for the anti-retrovirals for one person for a year. An exhibition opens at the National Gallery, and there's the crusading Pieter-Dirk Uys who's educating a whole generation through his AIDS struggle theatre, delivering the opening speech. The weekend is taken up by the excited chatter of people who attended the 46664 Concert, who might not have given a toss about AIDS before, but who are now indirectly linked to "the struggle".

Then there was the launch of two books, one an academic book, The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa by Professor Nicoli Natrass, and Long Life - HIV Positive Stories by the Bambanani Women's Group. What an uplifting experience! Ordinary women telling emotional stories of survival. Simple, but moving drawings and photography celebrating life. No SIPs (Self-Important Persons); just a room full of modest doctor heroes who work in extremely challenging conditions, activist heroines who do not give up despite the odds, committed academics lending intellectual muscle to the AIDS struggle, backroom artists equipping the voiceless with the creative means to speak powerfully, and scores of ordinary people of all colours who are concerned about winning this new struggle.

There is an organic, unforced non-racialism reminiscent of the Eighties. There is a deep sense of humanity; people are here for each other., Here is ubuntu in practice rather than as a clich? in some hollow moral regeneration pamphlet. Individuals are freely acknowledged and celebrated for what they have done, rather than for the positions that they occupy and that demand genuflection. The songs are vibrant. There is the confidence of people taking responsibility for their destinies. Here is a little oasis of what the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist democracy was about. This is but one of the legacies of the TAC.

It is ironic that far from the modern palaces of power with their "what's-in-it-for-me" morality and the distant cathedrals of empty moral-speak, a new morality is being forged that affirms life, that celebrates others and gives expression to the values of non-racialism and democracy, in the midst of a deadly disease that is passed on primarily through sexual activity. And in the midst of all this, music, visual art, theatre, craft, literature, film and dance are singing in protest, moving to life-affirming rhythms and painting fresh visions of what could be.

Access the Mail and Guardian website here

Artists' Action Around AIDS - Acknowledging, Commemorating, Celebrating, Challenging and Committing

Report by Judith King, HIVAN Media Office

A workshop focusing on creative approaches to the themes of myth, gender and children launched HIVAN's campaign dedicated to Artists' Action Around AIDS. Held on 4th August 2003 in the Drama Department on the University of Natal's Durban campus, and facilitated by well-known Durban art curator and project manager Bren Brophy, the programme offered postgraduate participants from a variety of creative disciplines and local educational institutions a day of information, exploration, interaction and application.

The welcome address was given by HIVAN's Director of Social and Behavioural Science, Professor Eleanor Preston-Whyte. This was followed with a presentation by UND's Head of Anthropology, Professor Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, on the rationalist versus the "non-rational" approach to illness and the effect of mythological themes on unconscious and conscious behaviour around HIV/AIDS - which established the context for and framework of the Workshop itself as the programme moved through a range of theoretical and informative demonstrations to an afternoon of practical creative and reflective experiences.

The second session featured a presentation given by three HIV-positive women from Khayelitsha in Cape Town who are participant artists in a collaborative project co-facilitated by Medicins Sans Frontieres, UCT's Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), Otherwise Media and Jane Solomon. This phased action research project uses powerfully expressive and innovative tools including memory boxes, personal journals or memory book-work, verbal, written and illustrated contributions to an advocacy publication called "Long Life", and the painting of body maps.

Noreen Ramsden, author, artist and a veteran activist for children's rights, then presented on artmaking as a therapeutic option for traumatised children, and demonstrated the indicators in children's art that signify cognitive development and emotional states. She also spoke about the rights of children to have access to both creative, personal art for healing and growth and to activist artmaking skills, so as to strengthen children's voices in the process of social change.

Pieter-Dirk Uys in action

The group moved into a studio setting, where actors and puppeteers Mpume Nthombeni and Kasaren Pillay of the Madcaps Creative Theatre Company performed an awesome rendition of "Amagama Amathatu", a drama workshopped, produced and directed by Gisele Turner and Wendy Nell. Pegged on the interactive line "HIV - let's face it" which drew the audience into the performance at pivotal points in the drama, the script embraced and articulated real-life scenarios, personalities and issues surrounding, underlying and driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South African communities.

After lunch, the participant gathering moved into two smaller groups for creative activities. One focused on mask-work, with role-play "behind the masks", while the other engaged in printmaking of "paper prayers". The afternoon closed with an informal, but no less stirring, performance-presentation by internationally acclaimed "actor-vist" Pieter-Dirk Uys, offering his reflections on HIV/AIDS, his own prevention campaign road-show, sex and sexuality, fear, humour, instinctive responses and human choices.

All in all, with the HIV/AIDS epidemic touching individual and communal lives in so many different but forceful ways, the workshop group left with a deeper sense of how their contributions, whether artistic or purely humanistic, can inform a more hopeful and healed future.

African cosmology and disease: the world of myth in approaches to HIV/AIDS

Report by Judith King, HIVAN Media Office

HIVAN's Artists' Action Around AIDS Workshop, hosted on 4th August 2003 at the University of Natal, commenced with a presentation by UND's Head of Anthropology Professor Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala. Her talk revolved around myth and rational vs. non-rational thinking in approaches to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Focusing specifically on HIV/AIDS as a disease syndrome around which there are many questions without definitive answers, Prof Leclerc-Madlala explained that global responses to HIV/AIDS had largely been constructed on a scaffolding of Western "rational", biomedical understandings of infection and fatal illness. This mindset is premised on clinical observation, empirical studies and microbiological research, with pharmacological products being developed through these methods to counter the processes identified in the course of the body's infection and deterioration.

Through globalisation and a historical impingement of Western influences upon African societies, the contemporary African model straddles both the "rational" understanding of disease causation and the "non-rational" - that is, it simultaneously draws from, and tries to conform to, a world-view that is based on a more holistic ontology. African belief in causation involves a focus on a more ultimate conceptualisation of illness and on answering the question: "Why?" - as opposed to the more immediate approach that characterises Western thought, that of determining "what" and "how" the disease process develops within the body.

Since these two systems are essentially at odds with one another, but are well-established in Africa, complications in the management of disease arise in the form of confused communications between doctor and patient, poor adherence to drug therapy and inadequate delivery within health-care systems. Many key role-players within these scenarios experience frustration and "burn-out" because of this discordance.

Almost all African peoples believe in a supreme Creator who resides in the heavens and whose universal presence generates and sustains all life. This Being, although translated through Western thought as "God", has no name and is not depicted visually. Lesser divinities in the form of long-dead ancestors are delegated certain tasks and roles in order to mediate with earthly souls via a "meso-" level of communication. Human diviners, healers and herbalists, as well as animal "familiars", act in spiritual service to the ancestors by performing and interpreting ritual practices which symbolise and invoke specific archetypal energies and attributes, so facilitating such communication.

The spirits of the dead, especially the recently deceased, are not worshipped, but rather honoured and acknowledged in order to ensure that the living individual's relationship with these "good" spirits secures his or her protection from co-existent "evil" spirits. The origin of most diseases is therefore traced back to a negative status in terms of this relationship, and a resultant foothold being gained by malevolent spiritual forces. Explanations for this negative status are sought through consultations with a spiritual mediator, such as a sangoma, who can relay the querent's predicament to the ancestral realm and in turn relay some answers from a trusted, heroic and, in some cases, deified source.

With the backdrop of these contrasting models, people in Africa are grappling with their individual and collective engagement with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, so that most approaches to its management are not "rational" from anyone's perspective. The Western mindset is pre-occupied with "cost-benefits" of treatment modalities, and with "education" being fundamental to prevention programmes - all based on the assumption that the affected or vulnerable individual can exercise reasonably informed choices in these matters. However, in the African world-view, personal decision-making is not necessarily enabled by nor appropriate to certain customary conventions and belief systems, and the largely gendered structure of these systems simply does not support the imposition of Western capitalist responses.

In an ethos of such overwhelming psycho-spiritual confusion around a deadly epidemic, the desperation resulting from the agonising physical conditions on which it feeds and flourishes, and the profound emotional distress it causes and thrives within, drives an intense sense of fatalism. This, in turn, broadens people's search for meaning, and drawing upon myths is a way to "explain the unexplainable". As the HIV/AIDS epidemic bites deeper into communities and households, people will "scratch harder" to seek answers, which leads to the re-creation of myths as an "alternative way of knowing".

Prof Leclerc-Madlala suggested that this leaves the ground open for artists, who by their nature are physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually adept at appreciating and exploring the need for such quests, to use the creative process in ways that might support healing in African society. She referred to a recent study by the HSRC on attitudes amongst youth in South Africa, which had yielded a finding of 31% of young people expressing their view of life and personal future as "...meaningless, hopeless and likely to get worse." (From: "Addressing AIDS" by Christian de Vos and Abigail Baim-Lance in: Public Attitudes in Contemporary South Africa; published by Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, 2002).

"This is what we, as artists and social scientists, need to be offering treatment and remedies for," said Prof Leclerc-Madlala. "We need to give some hope back to our young people, otherwise what future can they, or any of us, contemplate?"

During the ensuing discussion period, Benjamin Haskins (from the Durban Institute of Technology) suggested that, just as in former times when Christian missionaries spread their particular doctrine in concerted ways across Africa, contemporary artists could vigorously deploy modern alternative means of "messaging" with a common purpose around HIV/AIDS in our country. All agreed that artists can and should play a vital role in this regard, by supporting a transformative consciousness that would effect social change, not solely as a media tool or through dogmatic imposition, but in the development of a new language of healing through self-expression and experiential innovation.

Furthermore, workshop participants felt that art in all its forms enables and enhances healing through reflection and discovery; the "messages" are not concrete in all instances, but aesthetic signifiers touch on emotional realities, while creative experimentation taps into the depths of pain, illness and sexuality. Artmaking results in the manifestation of an object, performance or other created entity existing OUTSIDE of the Self, providing a safe space from which the individual can observe and analyse its properties and meaning. Collective healing is enabled by sharing these skills and processes and the artworks they generate.

Performance of Foreign AIDS by Pieter-Dirk Uys

Pieter-Dirk Uys gave a special one-night-only performance of Foreign AIDS on 4 August 2003 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre (University of Natal, Howard College Campus). The performance was opened by the Sinikithemba Choir and all proceeds from the event were donated to the Choir. The event formed part of the "Artists' Action Around AIDS" campaign run by HIVAN.

About Foreign AIDS

With rave reviews from TIME magazine, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, London Observer, De Telegraaf and Volkskrant, Pieter-Dirk Uys illustrates how the minefield of South Africas social struggle has moved from politics to sex - and how AIDS would succeed where apartheid failed. Through the characters of Evita's sister Bambi Kellermann, Dr Thaboo Macbeki, Nelson Mandela and other icons and ai-konas, Uys reflects on and expresses the greatest fear facing the world, and specifically South Africa - HIV/AIDS in a powerful production that is both moving and familiar.

HIVAN Exhibition - Artists' Action Around AIDS - Durban Art Gallery - 25 July to 25 August 2003

Rave reviews of the "Artists' Action Around AIDS" Exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery have resulted in the works being displayed for a further week, the closing date now being 25th August 2003. This inordinately moving and varied collection of works has been curated by Bren Brophy and facilitated by Jill Kruger, Deputy-Director of Social Science research at HIVAN, the Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking. The Exhibition was opened on 5th August by Professor Eleanor Preston-Whyte, HIVAN's Director of Social Sciences.

The "Artists Action Around AIDS" Exhibition explores the role of the visual arts in the struggle against the pandemic, together with the need to reassess the language of the cultural arts as a dynamic force - not only in terms of a better dispensation for infected and affected communities (through social and political change and education) - but also as a means of understanding, exploration, healing, growth and transformation. This collective rendition of the "physical face of AIDS" can, in many instances, be traced to the dedicated attention of artists as a manifestation of their broader commitment to archiving, documenting, exploring and articulating the human condition.

The personal and collective psychology surrounding HIV/AIDS reflects the contradictions and paradoxes of a disease that, on the one hand, evokes fear, stigma, alienation and isolation, but also expresses emotional and social responses of celebration, courage, determination, hope, faith and social upliftment.

The Exhibition features:

• A large-scale sculptural installation made entirely of male and female condoms, by artist Fiona Kirkwood.
• The Rural Women's Craft Development project: "Siyazama", featuring poignant personal stories and scenarios depicted in beaded soft-sculptured figurines.
• "Sezenjani Ngengculazi" - (What are we doing about AIDS?): a collection of pieces the African Art Centre, including prints, paintings, soft-sculpture and carving.
• Paper Prayers - AIDS awareness through printmaking (hand-made paper strips emulating the ancient Japanese tradition of offering painted strips of paper as prayers for healing).
• Living Openly Portrait project (an initiative of the "Beyond Awareness Campaign"): a black-and-white documentary photographic exhibition consisting of 31 portraits with accompanying text. The works document the images (portraits) and perspectives (interviews) of HIV-positive South Africans who have disclosed their HIV status.
• "Mind, Body, Memory Maps" - 12 large paintings of illustrated body outlines produced by HIV-positive women from Khayelitsha who use these innovative life-drawings as internal journals to depict memories of trauma and loss and to record their recovery and regeneration.
• Large-scale acrylic-on-canvas works by Anya Subotzky.
• Fifty small-scale acrylic paintings: collaborative works by Anya Subotzky and Libuseng Potsane.
• The HIV/AIDS Billboard Print Portfolio, presented by Artists for Human Rights - 20 works on paper by artists from Britain, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique.

HIVAN Workshop - Artists' Action Around AIDS - Myth, Gender and Children in Artists' Action Around AIDS - Acknowledge, Celebrate, Commemorate, Challenge and Commit

The purpose of the "Artists' Action Around AIDS" Workshop was to explore the role of the cultural arts in the struggle against the pandemic, together with the need to reassess the language of the cultural arts as a dynamic force - not only to ensure a better dispensation for infected and affected communities (through social and political change and education) but also as a means of understanding, exploration, healing, growth and transformation.

At first glance, it may seem that 'artists acting around AIDS' refers to the capacity that the arts have to effect change and awareness around what is broadly perceived to be a health issue. Given this framework, culture is seen as a means to an end, in that the expressive arts provide an effective vehicle for the "messaging" of information and as an educational tool.

The languages of the arts, versatile and creative as they are, cross boundaries of culture, language, literacy and religious belief. Not surprisingly, collaborations between visual artists, the media, performing artists and educationists have resulted in effective projects and campaigns that highlight the issues and myths surrounding HIV/AIDS. The "physical face of AIDS" can, in many instances, be traced to the dedicated attention of artists as an expression of their broader commitment to archiving, documenting, exploring and expressing the human condition.

In South Africa the rise of the anti-apartheid movement led to the development of "resistance culture". A recent discussion paper noted: "These organisations and movements were a testing ground for a range of alternatives to mainstream, colonially derived cultural production & and could re-infuse the cultural arena with rich critical debates&". Arts writer Mario Pissarra notes that: "Certainly, the current artistic environment where 'development' has become synonymous with individualistic careerism can be challenged by an alternative model based on the notion of artists working together for change."

Central to the real development of 'artists acting around AIDS' is the need to re-open the debate that art is more than a mere tool for social activism. Art for art's sake has the power to transform life. In a recent interview with artist Kendell Geers that focused on the efficacy of art as activism, he says, "I use reality to provoke art and I use art to provoke reality&. for me, being in the world - the revolution of everyday life - is my primary activity, and art is the residue." Art-making often reflects only the residue of creative activity and experience.

The personal and collective psychology surrounding HIV/AIDS reflects the contradictions and paradoxes of a disease that on the one hand evokes fear, stigma, alienation, isolation, sickness and death, but also manifests emotional and social responses of celebration, courage, determination, hope, faith and social upliftment. Against this backdrop of immense human challenge and suffering, the arts explore and express the subtleties of human perception and experience and the collective and universal nature of human emotion.

A humanistic view of the world suggests that knowledge and understanding must be acquired by engaging with a world of meaning, values and emotions. Experiential art-making engages these faculties and awakens growth potential that is healing, commemorative and life-affirming. Integration of body and mind, acceptance, forgiveness, loss and grief are archetypal human progressions not unfamiliar to the language of art - sight; hearing; thought; memories; ideas; beliefs; attitudes; touch; smell; taste; feelings and dreams.

Art as an existential, humanising force gives voice to the "un-seeable" - that is, the spirit or the soul. As mirrors of the soul the arts are rather like waking dreams. Their ability to engage us in our own explorations speaks to a generosity of spirit that distinguishes the artist's intentions. Art allows intimacy and alienation to co-exist. The order inherent in works of art always edges towards chaos. Risk and experimentation are essential - this embodies the souls constant state of flux.

The growth of consciousness on life's pathway is the very process of art-making and lies at the heart of the contribution artists make when they "act around AIDS".

Workshop themes:

Myth
The myths that surround HIV/AIDS enable the disease and contribute to social and cultural practices that permeate all levels of human activity. The cultural arts, given their attention to communication, psychology, documentation and the subtleties of human perception, may provide new insights into how and why HIV/AIDS myths pervade human interactions.

Gender
Gender stereotypes underpin discrimination and inequalities, contributing to the pandemic. The cultural arts are well placed to explore these stereotypes.

Children
The cultural arts are creative and expressive. They cross boundaries of language and culture and, as such, may conceivably give voice to a sector of the community that is often abused, neglected and silenced. Art heals, inspires and teaches.

The workshop aims and objectives were:

• To give artistic reflection, translation and presentation to the above themes.
• To educate through art and entertainment.
• To enlighten and sensitise participants by identifying cultural components in addressing HIV/AIDS.
• To give voice to the cultural dynamics of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
• To provide a platform for expression.
• To magnify the impact and role played by the cultural arts in the politics and dynamics of HIV/AIDS, and the link between the cultural arts and the scientific community.
• To inspire creativity and commitment.

The following "threads" gave focus to the aims and objectives of the Workshop and provided a framework for discussion and creative activities:

• Acknowledge - Acknowledge the contribution of those who have given and continue to give to the struggle against HIV/AIDS.
• Celebrate - Celebrate the many positive strides that have been made in the struggle with the hope of further gains.
• Commemorate - Commemorate the lives of those who have been lost to the pandemic.
• Challenge and Commitment - Challenge and educate those who are and remain ignorant and silent, and to make a commitment to cultural arts interventions.

(As identified by the International Working Group of the XIII International AIDS Conference, 2000)

Workshop programme included:

• A full day workshop with theoretical presentations and discussions in the morning followed by practical activities in the afternoon.
• Morning: two full-hour visual presentations: "Myth" and "Body Maps", followed by two shorter presentations featuring "Children" and "Gender".
• Afternoon: small group electives will focus on hands-on art-making (performance or visual)
• High tea from 15h00 with Pieter-Dirk Uys (Question-and-Answer session) will end the day.
• 16h30 - 17h00: An optional walkabout of the visual arts exhibition "Artists' Action Around AIDS" at the Durban Art Gallery.
• Morning tea and lunch will also be provided.
• After the Workshop, attend a complimentary special performance of "Foreign AID" featuring the legendary Pieter-Dirk Uys, at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre. A performance Reception will be held at 18h30 for 19h00.

The workshop ran concurrently with the SA AIDS Conference at the ICC and a visual arts exhibition "Artists Action Around AIDS" at the Durban Art Gallery.

Workshop Information

This Workshop was sponsored by HIVAN (The Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking) for a maximum of 40 participants. Preference was given to registered postgraduate students. There was no charge for attendance at the Workshop, and all materials were provided. The workshop took place at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban Campus, on 4 August 2003.