The fight against HIV stigma has been a long and arduous journey. While medical advancements have made significant progress. The social barriers surrounding HIV and AIDS remain a persistent obstacle. Here, art emerges as a powerful weapon, fostering empathy, challenging misconceptions and amplifying the voices of those living with HIV.
The World AIDS Day RED RUN wants to honor this rich tradition of the arts and how artistic expression has helped shape the cultural and political response to HIV, from the pandemic’s origins in 1981 to the present day.
Since 2019, Positive East commissions an artist to create the official World AIDS Day RED RUN imagery. Through these collaborations, we hope to make a small, but meaningful contribution to the HIV community’s rich artistic archive, while raising awareness of the World AIDS Day RED RUN and its importance amongst the community.
Visual Artist
Wednesday Holmes is a Queer, Working class, Illustrator and Writer based in Brighton, UK. Their art practise explores multiple territories such as Queer & Trans Solidarity, Social Justice, Community Care and Mutual Aid, Radical Ecology and more. Wednesday’s more central interest is in how art is used as a tool of resistance and connection in community.
Wednesday initially started creating activist illustrations to educate and inform people about their experiences as a non binary butch lesbian. They created 100 artworks and zines in 100 days broaching topics such as ‘dispelling harmful myths about trans people’ ‘what to do when someone comes out to you’ ‘A little handbook for the parents of transgender children’, ’ what I’ve learned about life since getting top surgery’ and many more. Their work went viral multiple times, and the zines were read by millions of viewers globally.
Wednesday’s work gained mass visibility and as a result, they had the chance to connect with Queer community initiatives and organisers to help facilitate safe spaces for queer and trans people. Two pivotal examples are that of a campaign for the LGBT center New York to help encourage TGNCI people to come in and access support for substance use. The illustrations were shown around the center and on the New York subway, drawing community members in to seek support. This kickstarted Wednesday’s deep interest in how illustration can be used to connect queer people in times of need.
Since then, Wednesday has spent 7 years working with community initiatives to support their work. They have created art with ‘The Outside Project’, ‘Positive East’ , ‘Not a Phase’, ‘AKT’, ‘Voices4 Ldn’, ‘Voices4 Berlin’, ‘Star Recovery Programme’, ‘The Proud Trust’, ‘Voices4’, ‘Transsober’, ‘Operation Olive Branch’, ‘Pay it Back UK’, ‘The National Centre for Suicide Prevention’ and many more. Alongside their community centered work, they have created queer centred work for clients such as : ‘Gucci’ , ‘BBC’, ‘Tate London’, ‘The V& A’, ‘Adidas’, ‘Adobe’, ‘Squarespace’, ‘Dr Martens’, ‘Nickelodeon’ and many more.
Visual Artist
Erin Aniker is an Illustrator whose bold and colourful people driven illustrations draw inspiration from the inclusive community she has grown up with in East London, her dual Turkish and British heritage and the colour palettes and patterns found in psychedelic and op-art of the 1960s and 70s.
She is influenced by the works of artists such as Bridget Riley, Fahrelnissa Zeid and women and human rights groups such as See Red Women’s Workshop.
Alongside her personal work, she enjoys creating illustrations for use in editorials, books, advertising campaigns and more.
She also enjoys hosting illustration workshops for all ages and abilities and has held illustration workshops with The Design Museum, The V&A, The Wallace Collection, Whitechapel Gallery, Nike London and Istanbul and various universities as well as working regularly with local charities and community arts groups.
Visual Artist
Combining documentary and animation practices, Saul’s work considers our evolving relationship with industry, new technology and the touch sense. His time with the interdisciplinary FilmMedicine Research Group at the University of Edinburgh has informed a highly collaborative approach to documentary, which looks to scrutinise both the role of the filmmaker and the complex ethical questions involved when representing the stories of others.
Saul’s current focus sees the development of ‘Touch Type’, a twenty-six part moving-image project exploring our transition from tangible to digital interactions with language, one another, and the wider world.
His work was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 and has shown at national and international film festivals including: Alchemy Arts Festival, Hawick, UK; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA; Raindance Film Festival, London, UK; London International Animation Festival, UK; Glasgow Short Film Festival, UK; Flatpack Festival, Birmingham, UK; and Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, UK.
Visual Artist
Chiara Ambrosio is a London-based filmmaker and visual artist, working across media to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, and articulate personal and collective histories and a sense of place.
Her work pays witness to that which struggles on the fringes of dominant narratives- communities, landscapes, stories, objects, perceptions, sensibilities- excluded and marginalised for a variety of different reasons but always fundamental to our understanding of what makes us human. Her work includes collaborations with musicians, composers and anthropologists, and has been presented extensively both nationally and internationally at venues such as The Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archives and La Cinematheque Francaise.
Chiara also produces “Raft”, a monthly radio show on London’s Resonance 104.4 fm radio station, where she embarks on walks across the city with other Londoners, reaping and sowing stories within its streets.
Visual Artist
Edd Carr is an artist from the North York Moors, UK. Adapting photographic processes into moving image – his work depicts our relationship to ecological crisis and the wider nonhuman world. Edd’s moving image work has been exhibited worldwide, including Holland, Australia, Germany, Japan, Korea, the USA, and the UK.
Edd has won multiple awards for his sustainable animation techniques, including the Channel 4 Random Acts Award. He also hand-printed the first 24fps cyanotype music video for Tycho Jones, which was nominated for the UK Music Video Awards 2021, and is a recent resident of Tokyo Arts and Space, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, researching animism in relation to ecological violence.
He is also one of the leaders of the Sustainable Darkroom, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the research, development, and advocacy of eco-friendly alternatives to analogue and digital photography.
Visual Artist
CozCon is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Through work that often braids together the languages of pop, queer and black culture, Coz aims to, in the words of Toni Cade Bambarra, “make the revolution irresitable”.
Much of their work is created in collaboration with organizations and nonprofits such as CultureStrike, Forward Together, Sons & Brothers and Planned Parenthood. They have also been featured in publications including Ebony and Vice and have had art commissioned and exhibited by the deYoung Museum of San Francisco.
You can find more of their on instagram @cozcon. To purchase art prints, visit the link below:
Visual Artist
Fredde Lanka is a gay Swedish proto-bear illustrating smutty, silly comics for the queer gamer generation who don’t read Foucault. A university lecturer and youth worker with his own queer art school in London (Queer Youth Art Collective), Christian moms have warned that Lanka is teaching the children an ‘asses up lifestyle’.
Rich gays who work in marketing are also a fan. Lanka has produced murals and illustrations for Youtube, Google and Conde Nast. A retiring erotic ceramicist, his pots have been sold at Liberty Department Store in London. And Trixie Mattel owns one apparently.
Fred’s visual art style is synonymous with nightlife and drag cabaret scenes in London, Birmingham and Stockholm, capturing the community at its most vibrant and diverse.
He also draws on the porno-politico-surrealism of Keith Haring, the heavy demonic blackwork of Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and the naive, brash comic studies of Nina Hemingsson.
