Five Artists Shortlisted in Competition to Create London’s First Permanent HIV/AIDS Memorial

Organizers behind London’s first permanent HIV/AIDS monument have announced a shortlist of five artists competing to design the public memorial. Anya Gallaccio, Ryan Gander, Harold Offeh, Shahpour Pouyan, and Diana Puntar were judged to have submitted the most appealing proposals for the structure. The memorial is to be located near Middlesex Hospital, where Princess Diana opened England’s first dedicated AIDS ward in 1987, famously helping to destigmatize the illness, at a time when it was wrongly believed to be spread by touch, by glovelessly shaking hands with a stricken patient. AIDS Memory UK (AMUK), the charity that began lobbying for the monument in 2016, has said it will “acknowledge an increasingly forgotten period in British history and the lessons we learnt from that time.”

A winner will be chosen this summer by a panel of eleven judges including National AIDS Trust chair Jane Anderson, AMUK founder Ash Kotak, art historian Satish Padiyar, artist Rana Begum, theater director Neil Bartlett, and writers Jack Guinness and Olivia Laing. The project is being partly funded by London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has set aside £130,000 (USD $166,000) from the city’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm for the purpose.

The five shortlisted artists all live and work in the London area. Gallaccio, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2003, is known for spare, large-scale installations featuring organic matter. Gander, the recipient of a 2017 Order of the British Empire medal, works across sculpture, clothing, typefaces, performance, and painting to create works that are often wryly witty. Humor is a tool also used by Offeh, whose participatory practice spans performance, video, photography, learning, and social arts. The Iranian-born Pouyan investigates themes of power and politics through ceramics, while Puntar, a native of New York, explores taste, wealth, and class through work incorporating furniture and design.