Dangerous Blood
Keywords:
Aids, blood, zoe, bios, materialityAbstract
From the early 1980s until the invention of HAART treatment in 1996, hiv/aids was more or less equal to a death sentence. Moving and infecting through blood, the disease turns this vital fluid into a poison. It resulted in stigmatisation and exclusion from society, and reacting against this exclusion, artists, such as David Wojnarowicz, Barton Lidice Benes and Ron Athey created artworks in order to understand the predicament and to counter the harsh animosity towards the diseased. This article considers how the meaning of blood changes as a result of the cultural impact of hiv/aids. It attempts to flesh out some of the ontological ambiguities of hiv/aids as simultaneously living and non-living, the ontological consequences it imposes on human bodies as it enters our bloodstream and delves into some of the art-based responses to this new ‘mode of being’.
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