Since it first came to public attention some 25 years ago, the deadly realities of the AIDS virus have become less pronounced in the minds of many, despite the fact that the incidence of new cases of infection has risen dramatically.
Arguments rage across the west that widespread ignorance and apathy is to blame. Indeed, the question remains – what is being done to combat the effects of this pandemic that is decimating in particular the African region?
According to statistics published by UNAIDS, the joint United Nations Program on HIV AIDS, in 2004, around five million adults and children became infected with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), the virus that causes AIDS. By the end of the year, an estimated 40.3 million people worldwide were living with HIV/AIDS.
Yet ignorance and misinformation on a global scale seems to be almost as insidious and pervasive as the disease itself.
In an interview with A & U (Art & Understanding) magazine, a journal created by publisher David Waggoner in response to the loss of so many of his peers from HIV within the creative community, actor Dustin Hoffman commented that: ‘There’s an epidemic of media in this country. Now, more than at any other time in the history of the planet, information is right at your fingertips and yet, if you were to take a poll, wouldn’t you find that people still view AIDS as a gay disease? That’s the mythology—that HIV is a selective virus’.
Yet, as pointed out in the UNAIDS report, by December 2005 women accounted for 46% of all adults living with HIV worldwide with young people between the ages of 15 and 24 making up half of all new infections at the rate of 6000 new cases per day.
And with World Aids Day on December 1 last year, New York Fashion designer and philanthropist Kenneth Cole, who is well known for his commitment to human rights issues, launched in conjunction with KNOW HIV/AIDS, a joint public education initiative of Viacom Inc. Another fashion company, the Kaiser Family Foundation, also unveiled the ‘We All Have AIDS’ campaign.
This initiative brought together key entertainment, political, social and scientific leaders in an effort to foster needed solidarity and to bring light to the devastating stigma associated with those living today with HIV/AIDS.
In launching the campaign the designer stated, as reported in a press release sent out by amFAR (the American Foundation For Aids Research) that ‘Ninety-five percent of the people living with the virus [worldwide] don’t know they have it,’ and that ‘if anyone has AIDS, we all have it’, highlighting the long held belief in the arena of AIDS awareness that ‘people need to realize AIDS is not someone else’s problem’.
Tapping into the arts community to get across the AIDS awareness message is not a recent phenomenon by any means.
One need only look at the early AIDS awareness works created by activist group Gran Fury, design visionary Tibor Kalman and iconic artist Keith Haring to note the impact made on furthering the AIDS awareness agenda in some of its earliest and most controversial incarnations when the AIDS virus was still largely seen as being a gay disease with no real impact on the wider community.
Reacting to governmental apathy, many arts organizations have taken it upon themselves to promote AIDS awareness to the masses and raise much needed funds used to both aid those living with the disease as well as work towards finding a cure.
Organizations such as Visual Aids, a body created by a collective of American artists in response to the AIDS crisis strives, according to its mission statement: ‘to increase public awareness of AIDS through the visual arts, creating programs of exhibitions, events and publications, and working in partnership with artists, galleries, museums and AIDS organizations’.
Visual Aids has been responsible for bringing the AIDS message to the general public on a global scale with initiatives such as the annual Day Without Art campaign and the now iconic Red Ribbon Project.
The canon of the arts has been used to great effect in raising global awareness of the realities of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, where, in 2003, according to AVERT, a UK based international HIV and AIDS charity, ‘an estimated 25 million adults and children were living with HIV, most receiving little, if any medical treatment’.
Africa’s greatest human rights activist, Nelson Mandela took up the fight on behalf of his beleaguered countrymen with the creation of the 46664 program (Mandela’s prisoner number during his long incarceration under apartheid) – an arts-based musical initiative with the aim of raising global awareness about HIV/AIDS in Africa and funds to fight the pandemic in Southern Africa by calling on the time and resources of international celebrities and corporations.
With the request to ‘give one minute of your life to AIDS’, Mandela has brought the plight of the nation to a global platform the likes of which has never before been seen.
Perhaps Nelson Mandela said it best in a speech delivered at a 46664 event in relation to the changing face of AIDS in modern times: ‘We must act now for the sake of the world … AIDS is no longer a disease, it is a human rights issue.’
