Description
I met Tessa Boffin in 1988 at an AIDS and Photography meeting at the then-London Lesbian and Gay Centre. We decided to collaborate on an exhibition and book project about AIDS and representation in the UK. This was partly because a lot of the discourse was American dominated and partly because we wanted to make a pro-sex and pro-queer HIV project to counter the British government’s response.
“The book and exhibition launched with it represent a powerful exploration of both image and text of the AIDS crisis.
Different voices reveal the profound inadequacies in our attitude to the disease. The contributors disrupt the politically-laden mythology of HIV/AIDS and affirm the persistence of love and desire in the face of death.
More than an interruption to personal life, AIDS has stimulated an eruption in creative life. By wresting control of the imagery of AIDS, Ecstatic Antibodies demystifies icons like the nation and the family and illuminates attitudes to gender, sexuality, racial and moral diversity.”
Emily Andersen
Tessa Boffin
Mehboob Dada
Rotimi Fani-Kayode
Margot Farnham
Nicola Field
Joy Gregory
Sunil Gupta
Lynn Hewett
Alex Hirst
Isaac Julien
Stuart Marshall
Roberta McGrath
Mandy Merck
Pratibha Parmar
David Ruffell
Allan deSouza
S R Tobe
Simon Watney
Jeffrey Weeks
ISBN: 978-1854890146
Sunil Gupta (born in New Delhi in 1953) is a photographer, curator, writer, and activist. Gupta migrated to Canada at the age of fifteen. He was educated in photography at the New School, New York (1976) and the Royal College of Art, London (1983). Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity–his own lived experience was a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history. Gupta’s work has been exhibited internationally and published in numerous monographs and catalogues, including Christopher Street, 1976 (2018) and From Here to Eternity (2020).
