CfP: Visualities of HIV/AIDS
In the United States, World AIDS Day (1st of December) is often marked as a “Day Without Art”, an initiative launched in 1989 by Visual AIDS to commemorate artists and activists lost to AIDS and to highlight its impact on the art world. While this gesture fosters collective memory and solidarity, it can also limit the understanding of HIV/AIDS visuality, reducing it to absence, mourning, and silence. This issue of The View seeks to explore the full spectrum of visual practices related to HIV/AIDS — not only those that disappear, but also those that create, document, protest, support, and transform.
This issue invites contributions that critically explore the visual dimensions of the HIV/AIDS — its representations, absences, and the role of visuality in shaping knowledge, institutions and structures of power, memory, and community We warmly encourage authors both to also look beyond the field of art (press, television, social media, popular culture, fashion) and to engage with a wide range of sources and media — including contemporary art, film and audiovisual practices, photography, digital media, archives, and alternative visual forms.
We seek decolonial and decentralising perspectives, moving beyond the dominant U.S. and Western European-centric narratives to open space for local histories, transnational experiences and alternative visual practices. The experience of AIDS is not monolithic. Different epidemiologies, dominant modes of transmission, social conditions, and political contexts have shaped the HIV/AIDS in distinct ways across the globe—differentiating the so-called Western, Eastern, and Southern (including African and Southern American) experiences. These geopolitical divisions shape how the infection and the illness are represented, understood, and lived. We invite contributions that transcend these boundaries, seeking perspectives that connect, complicate, and localise the HIV/AIDS rather than simplify or universalise it.
This issue aims to foster critical reflection on the role of visuality in constructing knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and to encourage creative dialogue between theory and visual cultural practice.
We welcome submissions that address, among others, the following topics:
- visual histories of HIV/AIDS – how images of the HIV/AIDS have changed across time and space; how visual representations of HIV/AIDS point to their historical milieu
- visuality and visibility of HIV/AIDS activism and humanitarianism – from protest art to public representation strategies
- critical and decolonial approaches – how visuality can serve as a site of control or resistance to hegemonic medical, political, and cultural narratives, and criminalisation
- transnational support networks and their visual expressions – from local initiatives to global movements of solidarity
- unrepresented and marginalised groups – their presence (or absence) in visual narratives of HIV/AIDS
- gendered experiences of HIV/AIDS, including women's experiences – their representations, narratives, strategies of resistance and care
- visual memories — including intragenerational transmission of HIV/AIDS memories and experiences through images
- archival and exhibition practices — how personal, community, and institutional archives preserve, transform, or erase the visual traces of HIV/AIDS; practices of collecting, preserving, and sharing HIV/AIDS-related visual sources, especially online; (ethical) challenges related to archiving, access, and representation
- HIV/AIDS narratives — how HIV/AIDS has shaped the discursive frameworks and modes of visual representing illness and epidemics
- HIV/AIDS theories – how HIV/AIDS has informed theories used for analysing visual practices, new theoretical approaches to HIV/AIDS visuality.
Deadline for abstracts: 31st of December 2025
Deadline for full papers: 30th of April 2026
Languages: Polish, English
Please send abstracts (up to 300 words) and a short bio to the organizers.
Contact Information
Dorota Sosnowska (University of Warsaw)
Katarzyna Szarla (University of Warsaw)