Art exhibition comes face-to-face with HIV/AIDS

The issue of HIV/AIDS is addressed in an exhibition at the University Art Museum.

Face to Face with HIV/AIDS, on show from May 29 to July 31, brings together projects by three Australian artists.

William Yang's Sadness will be exhibited as a diarised photographic exhibition and as a performance, documenting meetings between William and his friend Allan, who has AIDS.

The performances, on June 3 and 4, will be the first Brisbane showing of Sadness for the artist who is undertaking an Australian tour, The North.

Maree Azzopardi's Chrysalis and Missing projects are born from a period when she was artist in residence in the palliative care centre for AIDS at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney.

Self Documentation, Self Imaging: People Living with HIV/AIDS 1998 ..., a project facilitated by Kathy Triffitt, combines photographic and written oral histories by people living with HIV/AIDS.

Ms Triffitt will run workshops in conjunction with the exhibition so that people living with HIV/AIDS can be involved in the project.

Work produced will form part of the project and feature a performance 'Am I dead, Sweethearts?' on Thursday July 30.

Curator Jillian Duffield said the exhibition, presented by the University Art Museum in association with Queensland AIDS Council, was the first in Queensland to focus on representations of people living with HIV/AIDS.

'This exhibition provides the University's wide art audience with an opportunity to see poignant, thoughtful and thought-provoking works on the subjects of portraiture and HIV/AIDS,' Ms Duffield said.

'As well as appealing to artists, it will be of particular significance to students undertaking a range of courses, such as portraiture, the body and society, and a medical subject, Death and Dying.'

For further information contact the University Art Museum on (07) 3365 3046.