Science Friday - How Artists And Scientists Collaborated To Make Art About HIV

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

How Artists And Scientists Collaborated To Make Art About HIVThis past July, the 12th International Conference on HIV Science was held in Brisbane, Australia. But this wasn’t your typical scientific conference. Yes, findings were presented on the latest in HIV research, but it culminated in a museum exhibition.12 HIV-positive artists were paired with 12 scientists, and each pair collaborated on a piece of art, largely based on the scientists’ research. One of the pieces attracted a bit more attention than the others.Kairon Liu, an artist, curator, and photographer, and Kane Race, a professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney, wanted to create something that commented on the negative effects of global HIV policy and the current stigma of living with the disease. The resulting piece is titled Untransmittable, a transparent penis-shaped sculpture filled with thousands of expired antiretroviral pills.Science Friday producer and Universe of Art host D. Peterschmidt sat down with Liu and Race to talk about the piece they made, why they couldn’t take it over the Australian border, and their hopes for future HIV research. To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, Ira here. A lot of you have said, hey, Ira, we like the podcast, but sometimes we just want to listen to one story at a time. And we hear you. So we're going to try something new. A topic or two a day spread out through Monday through Science Friday. Have a listen. What happened when scientists and artists were paired together to make art at a scientific HIV conference? When I was creating this piece, I wanted to make it more personal. Despite every benefit we get from the free. remandication, we still get a rejection. It's Wednesday, October 11th, and today, just like every day, is Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer, D. Peter Schmidt. This past July, the 12th International Conference on HIV Science was held in Brisbane, Australia, but this wasn't your typical conference.

Yes, findings were presented on the latest in HIV research, but it culminated in a museum exhibition. Twelve HIV-positive artists were paired with 12 scientists to create art largely based on the scientist's research. I spoke to one of those pairs about their work and their hopes for future HIV research. And just a heads up for parents listening with kids, we'll be talking about anatomy and adult topics in this conversation. In the HIV science as art exhibit at Brisbane's Metro Arts, you could find pieces about breastfeeding, STIs, and exploring a possible cure for the virus. And one of them, titled Untransmitable, was the product of two conference attendees, and they're with me today. Kairan Liu is an artist, curator and photographer.

He's based in Taipei, Taiwan. And Kane Race is a professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. He's also the author of the book, The Gay Science, Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV. He's joining us from San Francisco, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Thanks very much, T. So, Kairn, you're an HIV-positive visual artist.

How did you approach this collaboration? So basically we both met through this experience, I mean, through this project. And we didn't really have an initial idea what kind of artwork that we are going to produce. It was until that I learned what kind of research that Ken is going to present at a conference. Then we start several talk section, I mean discussion online. And then in the end, we decided to create a sculpture or artwork can tell people this is how. how HIV-positive individuals live nowadays. Mm-hmm.

So, Kane, you studied the social impacts of HIV and the politics of public health messaging. How did your research contribute to this piece? So I guess my paper was really, and what Kiron and I discussed, was how the turn towards these biomedical solutions to HIV transmission and HIV prevention, how appealing that is for authorities

because it seems to promise that you don't need to talk about some of the complexities of sex, of sexual relations, of gendered relations. But actually, it's not quite as simple as the magic bullet that is kind of held out in this vision. And this is because, you know, HIV is still a highly stigmatized disease. It's often thought about as a moral verdict on the kind of person you are. And in a lot of parts of the world. A lot of people who might consider themselves to be at risk will still avoid HIV testing because the social consequences of being HIV positive are just too horrible to think about. And how is the landscape around this changed over the years as you've been studying it?

So really over the last decade, there have been really significant changes in how local and global agencies expect to achieve a reduction in HIV transmission around the world, whereas previously it mainly relied on sex education, on promoting condoms. More recently, the antiretroviral medications that people use to treat people living with HIV. It's been found in large clinical trials that if a person's on successful treatment and if their viral load is at an undetectable level, then there's really no possibility of them passing on the virus sexually. So this has been taken up with a lot of enthusiasm over the last decade, and now HIV prevention is really organised around getting people with HIV onto treatment, getting them to

achieve undetectable viral load, which requires adhering quite strictly to daily dosing with antiretiviral medication. And in the case of HIV-negative people at risk, they will access PrEP, which is also the same sorts of drugs, but taken by people who are negative in order to prevent them getting infected. Right. So Australia has this public health messaging campaign. Other countries have it too. It's called undetectable equals untransmitable. It's the idea that if you keep up with your medication and regular testing, you'll have like an undetectable. load of the virus and you won't be able to transmit it to someone else. They've been pushing it really hard, but you say it's not really accessible to everyone. Is that right? That's absolutely

right. I mean, I think that there are obviously various reasons that people might avoid HIV testing, but in a place like Australia, for example, where we have very strict immigration regulations, it's very hard to become a permanent resident if you're HIV-positive. So people who might be in Australia, for example, on student visas or on working holiday visas, they're probably more likely not to test because they might be scared of being deported if they're found to be HIV positive. So this whole idea of who are the populations at risk, how do we encourage them to test, is really intimately connected to lots of other bigger laws and policies, including immigration law. But also, you know, laws that might criminalize sex workers, might criminalize gay,

sex, might criminalise possession of drugs. These all have an impact on who comes forward to access these really successful, really effective treatment and prevention medications. So that's the sort of discussion I think that Chiron and I were having. And I have to say, I have so much admiration for Chiron in terms of just producing such a visually and emotionally arresting artwork out of this very wide-ranging conversation that we had about HIV policy around the world. Yeah, so let's talk about that artwork. It's a transparent penis-shaped sculpture with like thousands of different colored pills inside. Kairn, I'd love to hear more about it. Okay, so me as a visual artist and a person who have been living with a virus for years, I want to create a sculpture that use a real antivirus medication

as a narrative to tell people that this is what we have to take in order to turn the viral law in our body to be undetatable, to normalize ourselves to be more like general people. So for the audience, they will see a penis shade transparent shell, which is a shade of my own body part. It's like 60 centimeters high. It's like what you can see in a convenience store with a candy bar. I don't know. It's like, yeah. Lollipop dispenser or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can see plenty of colorful medication in there. There are thousands of antivirus pills. From the oldest, you can see 3TC, which has been created from the 80s. And the most used one, like Trubada, which is a small blue pill people use for prep. And to see through this sculpture, you can basically see the history of medication use. for HIV. I also want to make it more personal and more closely to how this viral can transmit to one person to another. So, Kyran, you made this in your studio in Taiwan, the sculpture, and I understand you weren't actually able to get it into the exhibition in Brisbane. What happened there? So originally, the piece is supposed to be a sculpture only. And obviously,

you can see through the picture and on social media, what we present at Breezy's was a photography piece because of the border control law reason, we couldn't really import the piece into the country because it's a real medication there. But although the medication we use in the sculpture are actually aspired. And once we settle the idea that we're going to make an artwork by the real medication, some of my friends immediately warned me that, you know, you might have some trouble to ship the artwork in the country. But anyway, I did fully sell the sculpture.

That means you won't be able to take the medication out of the sculpture. So we still didn't manage to bring the sculpture in the country. And that's why we decided to create another photograph piece, which is a piece that you can see me being naked holding the sculpture and trying to deliver my relationship with this part of my body and this part of my body. and this part of my identity and the fact that I have to take this medication to purify my blood. It's a beautiful photo of your arm wrapped around it, and that's what ended up being displayed at the exhibition was that photo with a description of the import problem.

Kane, I'd love to hear your thoughts when you heard what Kyran's idea was. When Kyran told me, oh, he's making this big sculpture of a penis full of anti-retroviral therapy. I was like, oh, that sounds fantastic. But of course I should have thought, how is he going to get this into Australia? Because I know what our border control is like. But actually the story of not being able to get the actual sculpture into Australia,

it does make you sort of think about how the circulation of these life-saving medications is very much impacted by, you know, national laws, by patents that are very few. defended by pharmaceutical companies. So, you know, in the ideal world, these medical commodities would be easily and freely accessible to everyone who needs them. But of course, that's really not the case. And so those sort of meanings became quite pertinent, I think, in the context of this whole story of not getting the sculpture into Brisbane. Exactly. Yeah. Well, obviously, there's been so much art in conversation with HIV-AIDS over four decades.

And Kyran, how do you feel like this piece and the others in the exhibition? How do you feel like this piece fits into that canon, that history of HIV art? That's a really big question. First of all, I think the exhibition is pretty phenomenal. You can see the art word to talk about breastfeeding. You can see the artwork talk about identity. Also sex. Yeah, also sex.

Yeah. So it really presented the diverse issue of this disease. And people have produced HIV-AIDS-related artwork and activism since the 80s because we were trying to use art as a way to fight for our ride to get the medication to the pharmaceutical company or to the authority. And after the 80s, we are really grateful now that we have cocktail treatment to be able to stay alive physically. But just like we discussed before, HIV is not.

just a eulness issue is also the socially issue. A lot of people are still suffering from prejudice stigma or like their country actually have the law against the HIV positive individuals. I think some of the status in America still have the HIV criminalization law and my country still have that as well. So I think the current HIV related to art is actually much more focus on the basic human rights. What can we solve after we got this treatment, which direction we should move before we find a true cure? Or can HIV become a reference to other virus transmitted disease in the future? Because we all know there will be new virus, new pandemic in the future. COVID is for one instance. You can see how people get nervous and

scared to other people and to start to split as a different group, as a different group, as a different try in our community. Is that making sense? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Kane, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, this slogan, U equals you, undetectable equals untransmitable, is being promoted around the world. And part of its appeal is that it sounds really simple. But actually it involves the daily practice of medication taking, which can be more or less fraught, depending on how you feel about your HIV status, your sexuality and so on. It involves regular engagement. with doctors who may or may not be accepting of the kind of person you are. So just to make that labor visible, I think, is one of the really important contributions that art makes.

Yeah, well, on that note, I know there's, like, so much labor and so much love that went into this piece and the other pieces at the exhibition. What do you hope people take away from your piece? And, Kairn, we can start with you. Personally, despite every benefit we get from the free medication and the U-equal-you, we still get a reality. by the others, by your family, by your potential lover, by even you itself. And this disease is a one way to remind you that you will not be able to go back to your old cell. So the current reality is that we have to take this pill to purify ourselves and also try to find a way to embrace this new version of ourself.

But it has also been really tricky that every day when you swallow the pill, you will know this is something that you have to take to be a normal person. Otherwise, your doctor would say, okay, your lab number is not okay. And it's like your full identity is being identified to the net lab number and this material that you keep swallowing. So I guess a really giant message that I want to present to the viewer, especially to, to the scientists is that our community is still waiting for cure. I, as a positive individuals, are still waiting for cure. Because a lot of people were assurance that now we have this really good medication and a lot of people say they suffer zero side of fat.

Maybe we can stop here. There's no reason to invest more resource to continue the research of cure because we all know that costs a lot. But a lot of us are still actually waiting for that. and I want to keep the scientists who are still working on that a cheers. And I also work as a researcher and social worker, so I interview a lot of positive individuals. And a lot of people are actually suffering,

suffer from long-term side effect, which is undocumented from the prescription or from your doctor. Let's say you somehow have some lymphoma after you start a medication or you suffer some other, like, liver situation, blah, blah, blah. It's super complicated. And these are all undocumented. It's not in the official research. And when you bring this problem and issue to your doctor,

they will just say, you know, last current reality now. And I really hope our focus and development of the scientists part won't stop here. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So I guess one of the take-home messages from my perspective is we've made incredibly huge a advances in HIV treatment and an HIV prevention over the last decade. It's now perfectly possible with access to medications for a person living with HIV to live a life as long as a person without HIV and not only that to not pass on the virus sexually even if condoms aren't used. So that's a pretty significant development. But I think one take home message is really that the HIV epidemic will not be

ended through medicine alone, that the struggle for sexual justice, for the acceptance of people with various different sexualities, various different gender identities and self-expressions, and also racial justice, particularly in places like the USA, are just as important as they were 40 years ago when this devastating epidemic commenced. Well, Kyron and Kame, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk about this. It was really special. Thank you so much. Yay, since we're having us. Thank you, Dee. I enjoyed the talk. That was artist Kairn Liu and Professor Kane Race,

Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. And if you want to learn more about the art from the exhibition, head to ScienceFriiday.com slash HIV art. That's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show, including Nehima Ahmed, Emma Gomez, Annie Niro, George Harper, and many more. On Thursday, we dive into the Mississippi River's saltwater issue and how Kenya's geothermal boom could help power Africa.

I'm D. Peter Schmidt. Thanks for listening. We'll see you Thursday on Science Friday.