Abstract
Discourse and memory around AIDS have often centred on White gay cis-men in Europe and North America. This is reflected in the way the history of the virus is often told and how the memory of the disease and the fight against it is created. While gay cis men have been among the most heavily affected by the virus, widespread narratives surrounding the epidemic often blur the complexity of the experiences of and histories created by the virus and have rightly been challenged. The Schwules Museum Berlin (Queer Museum Berlin) has increasingly reflected on its function as an arsenal as well as an archive and the connected role as a ‘memory maker’, trying to re-actualize its founding impetus as a subcultural ‘antimuseum’. Two recent exhibitions on HIV/AIDS at the museum attempted to provide a wider set of narratives and experiences beyond the already established one, diversifying the way HIV/AIDS history is told, thereby ‘queering’ a queer institution while exhibiting an inherently ‘queer’ topic. Using these two exhibitions as examples, this contribution is concerned with reflections from inside a queer cultural institution coming from the practical work of engaging with queer memory/ies.
Keywords
The 1980s saw the emergence of HIV/AIDS as a widespread pandemic. In Western Europe and North America, the disease was closely linked to marginalised groups, like the poor, people of colour and gay men, which most acutely felt the impact of the disease (and the ignorance of mainstream society). In Germany and the United States, much of the discourse and memory around HIV/AIDS has been centred on White, gay cis men. And while this group was indeed quite heavily affected by the virus, widespread narratives surrounding the epidemic generally blur the complexity of experiences and individual histories created by the virus, including those living with HIV/AIDS as well as caretakers and people who saw their friends and family impacted and their communities devastated. This short intervention seeks to shed light on how these complex histories are being handled in a memory-making institution itself: the Schwules Museum (SMU) in Berlin, Germany. This text does not emerge from a theoretical standpoint but rather from a practical perspective on how such an institution attempts to engage with the complexity of HIV/AIDS memory.
The founding of the Schwules Museum – literally translated as (male) Gay Museum – was contemporaneous with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Germany. Long-time board member Birgit Bosold describes its founding impetus ‘as a subcultural ‘antimuseum’ to challenge the hegemonial interpretational prerogative of classical historico-political institutions and their systematic exclusion of homosexual history/ies and culture/s from collection and exhibition practices. The SMU’s DNA is marked by a rootedness in a social movement and a reference to alternative experiences not represented in the mainstream museum, to non-canonical, ‘“wild” knowledge’ (Bosold and Hofmann, 2021: 28). This characterisation of the museum’s founding can still be applied today. While the focus of the museum has broadened, the impetus remains the same.
Throughout its history, the museum has gone through significant changes, drawing upon its founding intention to also critique itself and expanding its own mission towards a broader understanding of what it wants to collect, document, present and address. Having been initially focussed on gay cis men (hence the name), it is now a ‘queer’ institution, with queer here functioning as an umbrella term comprising a multitude of sexual and gender identities. In addition, it attempts to ‘queer’ traditional, simplistic understandings of what things like ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ even mean, thereby deconstructing fixed (often binary) understandings. Expanding the lens of whose experience and culture is (re)presented in the museum is a deliberate attempt to address the systematic exclusion from certain histories that also occurs inside our own queer communities, thereby expanding the initial focus on (male, binary-coded) homosexual history/ies and culture/s. It attempts to engage with its internal exclusions, in that way applying the critique of exclusion on itself. It also confronts the hegemonial interpretational prerogative of classical historic-political institutions, which still too often fail to move beyond a binary understanding of gender and which are still marked by the exclusion of queer history/ies and culture/s. 1 While a tacit embrace of queer artists and history can increasingly be witnessed in more classical institutions, it too often is still rather seen as a side note or addendum instead of understanding as an integral part of the museum’s collections, the people and history/ies featured in their exhibitions, and their visitors. The basic assumption until today has most often been that visitors are straight and cis. While it cannot be denied that the Schwules Museum has, to a certain extent, also become professionalised and institutionalised over the past almost 40 years, it still embraces non-canonical, ‘wild’ knowledge and its roots in social movements as well as attempts to embrace those who are less included. 2
To fulfil this aspiration, the museum’s building contains three main pillars: an archive, a library and an exhibition space. The museum has two purposes: it serves as a physical archive of queer history and culture as well as an arsenal of ideas, concepts, and experiences. In recent years, the museum has increased public outreach and programming by hosting workshops and events. With this, the museum serves also as a social space to get to know others, exchange ideas, and both create and contest community. 3 In that sense, it also attempts to create a utopia, a place in real life for queer people to gather, critique what is there (e.g. heteronormative history and cultural institutions) and envision what might be. In this sense, it also emphasises the connection between audience, community and the museum itself: in contrast to an older model of museums where people went to ‘learn’ and be educated, the SMU also sees community engagement and events as a way to explicitly learn from people coming to its premises, thereby blurring the lines between who teaches and who is taught.
The museum’s collection of HIV/AIDS-related artefacts is the largest HIV/AIDS archive in Germany. Most of the materials in the archive are centred on the experiences of White, cis-gendered gay males. While this is in line with the very few existing works on German HIV/AIDS history, 4 it is neither surprising nor inherently problematic in an institution that has primarily been focussed on exactly this population. At the same time, this leads to the problem of how to represent HIV/AIDS history without especially emphasising this group and potentially missing a wider range of experiences of people confronted with and affected by the virus.
For example, in the United States, the exhibition ‘Art AIDS America’ at the Tacoma Art Museum was strongly challenged due to a lack of people of colour in the exhibition. 5 Similar debates surrounding the way HIV/AIDS is presented in German memory have thus far rarely been raised (publicly). One possible reason might be the different trajectories of the epidemic in Germany: compared to many other countries in the ‘West’, Germany had a comparatively low rate of infections and deaths. 6 While impacted communities were still heavily affected, the pandemic never had such a strong impact as in other countries. In addition, the German federal government from relatively early on embraced and funded prevention strategies and community-based organisations, mostly by gay activists. This led to a de-politicisation and institutionalisation of AIDS activism in Germany, with activism in the vein of ACT UP in Germany being rather short-lived. 7 This de-politicisation might also carry over into the way HIV/AIDS is narrated in Germany. One might also argue that the lack of sources of people who were not White or not gay men simply reflects racist and sexist structures in German society. Not everyone had access to the same resources to record memories and activism. In contrast to the United States, little publicly visible work or artistic engagement has been done on the history of the epidemic in Germany. The book of Martin Reichert (2019) and a recent documentary on public television on German AIDS history (Knigge, 2021: ‘40 Jahre AIDS–Wir leben noch’) are rare examples of work that might reach a broader slice of society, which in turn may also contest the existing story/ies.
The museum also has a long history of exhibitions on HIV/AIDS. Over time several trends have emerged: (1) exhibitions have shifted from presenting HIV/AIDS as a contemporary, lived experience to a more historicising approach; (2) while art has mostly been the focus of early exhibitions, more recent exhibitions have tended to be more cultural-historical; (3) a steady increase in the range of perspectives presented can be observed – while initially exhibitions almost exclusively focussed on the experiences of White gay men from Germany and the United States, more recent exhibitions attempted to show a wider view on the memory of HIV/AIDS. I want to call attention to two recent exhibitions.
The 2019 exhibition HIVstories: Living Politics was a collaboration between the Schwules Museum and the three-year research project European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (Humboldt University Berlin, University of Basel, Goldsmith University of London, Jagiellonian University Krakow), with the researchers also serving as the curators. 8 The exhibition explored different ways of living politics from the perspectives of a variety of impacted communities in Europe. A section on Germany focussed on HIV prevention in prisons, while the Polish section explored the lives and activism of drug users and harm-reduction activists. Another section focussed on different historical phases of HIV/AIDS in Turkey, while the last country-focussed section investigated current discussions surrounding HIV by looking back at gay life before the virus. An overarching section looked at transnational connections of activism on the European level. The exhibition was composed of objects that had been collected in the research project. For instance, the researchers worked together with community organisations to collect artefacts, archival documents and artworks from existing archives as well as activists and organisations. They also conducted oral history interviews with activists, politicians, bureaucrats and medical practitioners. Some of these collected pieces were chosen to evoke the experiences and faces of those struggling against HIV/AIDS and the challenges they face(d) In collaboration with outside partners like the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, we also curated a side programme, which focussed on trans* oral histories in the United States; organised a workshop to bring together activists, artists and scientists working on HIV/AIDS; and collaborated with the theatre group MuMM (Migrants as multipliers for HIV/STI-prevention) to stage a performance of a theatre piece in Arabic on the subject of HIV/AIDS. The exhibition helped to make visitors more aware of the struggles against HIV/AIDS outside of Germany and the United States, the two primary centres of attention, while at the same time also bringing some attention to the rarely talked about the history of AIDS activism within prisons in Germany. The exhibition also travelled to Poland and Turkey and incorporated additional material from the local contexts. It also helped to foster the relationship between the museum and Humboldt University, which resulted in additional collaboration on other projects like the creation of the Berlin Aids Oral History Sammlung.
The next SMU exhibition centering HIV/AIDS opened in August 2021 and ran until February 2022, focussing on the museum’s archive. The exhibition, arcHIV. A search for traces, 9 attempted to dig into the diversity of the museum’s collections, asking what stories can be told from existing materials and what ‘traces’ of groups, topics, narratives and experiences can be found in them. The exhibition featured first a meta-part of three sections, reflecting on categorisation in the context of an archive, on how the museum exhibited HIV/AIDS in the past, and on archiving as a practice. Six additional sections were clustered around specific themes that emerged from the material over the course of researching the AIDS-related archive of the museum by the curators. One section was focussed on ‘grief’ and the way grief and grieving are visible in the archive. The next section focussed on AIDS ‘activism’ and how it is visible in the archive. A third section focussed on ‘law’ and its connection to HIV/AIDS. The next two sections were titled ‘faces’ and ‘bodies’; while the former focussed on who became the face of HIV/AIDS in Germany, the latter section focussed on the role the body plays in HIV/AIDS, for instance, as a marker of disease and a tool for pleasure, as well as the intersection of disability and HIV/AIDS. A final section focussed on ‘hope’ and its ambiguities. Since the exhibition was based on the museum’s archive, most artefacts featured come directly from the archive, including books, articles, leaflets and posters, as well as material objects and art pieces. These artefacts were supplemented by external additions to the archive that were acquired or requested during the research project, such as oral histories and films, material objects like a quilt, and digital artefacts like excerpts from a Twitter account on the diary of the late artist Jürgen Baldiga. Baldiga was an influential artist in Berlin from the 1980s up to his death in the early 1990s, who also became a well-known photographer documenting the capital’s queer scene at this time. Some of these aforementioned external artefacts also became part of the museum‘s archive after being shown in the exhibition. Also included is also a prop and testimonials donated by a neighbourhood theatre group of young adults from diverse backgrounds (Next Generation Ensemble of Theatre X) who worked with the museum on a project to develop a theatre piece on health, HIV/AIDS, and their own experiences within the German health care system. In addition, there was an event programme planned featuring panels on HIV/AIDS in queer archives and the future of HIV/AIDS remembrance, a screening of the documentary Rettet das Feuer on Jürgen Baldiga, a city walk (also featured in an app) on HIV/AIDS in East Berlin, and excerpts from the aforementioned theatre piece. The exhibition could not and did not attempt to tell ‘the story’ of HIV/AIDS. Instead, it showcased the museum’s AIDS-related archives and the stories that emerge from them. The artefacts from external sources were included to widen the perspectives featured in the exhibition, to include more contemporary experiences, and to develop some of the traces found during the archival research for the exhibition.
Each exhibition chose somewhat different ways to engage with the way HIV/AIDS is still often memorialised. HIVstories broadened the narrative by incorporating knowledge and materials detailing lived experiences from different European contexts gathered within the research project, looking at the past and present of HIV activism from a perspective that embraces the fringes of society. At the same time, this gave an opportunity to explore the ambiguities of activism (instead of a simple success story) and to show where different activisms intersected and went beyond identity-based activism. In contrast, arcHIV attempted to show the wide range of the museum’s HIV/AIDS collections. In the thematic sections of the exhibition, a particular attempt was made to showcase artefacts and stories that were found in the archives and are less often represented, including women, people of colour, and disabled people. The exhibition also featured sections focussed on meta-discussions and the practices of the museum itself. A section named ‘exhibiting’ explored the way HIV/AIDS was presented in previous exhibitions in the museum. A section titled ‘categorizing’ questioned how materials were categorised in the archive, which people and groups were (in)visible through these acts of categorization, and how certain categories emerged, changed or even vanished over time. A third meta-section focussed on ‘archiving’, asking how these materials can be archived, kept alive and engaged with in the future. Instead of going out and gathering explicitly underrepresented experiences like HIVstories did, this exhibition tried to look inwards and find what was already there but was often invisible.
Both exhibitions were faced with multiple challenges, some of which I mention here. One question was how to make the intensity and energy of activism accessible in an exhibition, especially considering that for most visitors HIV/AIDS is no longer part of their lived experience. Most surviving archival artefacts are documents and items; the usage of oral histories and video footage (e.g. of activists disrupting a conference) offer greater context by letting activists themselves speak and act, helping to also experience the emotional intensity. Instead of merely observing written documents, the audience transforms into something of a temporary bystander who ‘witnesses’ by watching a person speak for themself or watching footage of a protest themselves instead of just reading about it. Oral histories are also an important method for preserving and showing some of the ambiguities of HIV/AIDS history and perspectives from people and groups less well documented in material archives, often due to a lack of resources and access for preserving their stories or even creating them in the first place. Oral history allows for the presentation of stories instead of a unified HIV/AIDS ‘History’ by offering a variety of different accounts with sometimes conflicting interpretations.
A continuing challenge for the Schwules Museum is how materials come into the archive. This is dependent on donations by communities, and working with the HIV/AIDS collection makes clear that much is missing. This is no surprise considering that the emphasis on diversifying the collections began rather recently; the museum is still primarily a White, gay, cis institution and marginalised communities have often had fewer opportunities to create archival records in the first place. Collaborating with other community-based organisations and initiatives as well as universities for events, exhibitions, and research, can be a useful tool to mitigate this challenge. The advantage of the HIVstories exhibition was that it was able to draw on materials gathered by a multi-year research project funded by the European Union, thereby expanding the scope of access to materials from other countries and experiences and helping to explore the complexities of HIV/AIDS history. At the same time, the exhibitions also serve as an explicit invitation to everybody, especially less represented communities, to donate further material to the museum in hopes of expanding the museum’s collections so that future exhibitions can draw from a more diversified foundation.
Another issue was how to show the fluidity and evolution of categories and identities. Again, oral histories can be useful here; interviewees rarely stick to static ideas or identities, embracing instead ambiguities and complexity. Another attempt was to make the process of archiving more visible to visitors: the meta-section ‘categorizing’ in arcHIV tried to show this by tracing how the delineation of ‘risk groups’ changed over time by using the example of a file folder found in the HIV/AIDS collection titled ‘lesbians’, which turned out to be empty. We then decided to search for all references to lesbians found in the file folders located alphabetically before the ‘lesbian’ file folder. These were put on display together with some of the lesbian-related material found, raising the question of how archival material is sorted and by whom, while showing the wide variety of lesbian activism and experiences related to HIV/AIDS which can be located in ‘non-lesbian’ parts of the archive.
It is also important to find links and engage people in the present instead of mere historicization. The exhibitions featured videos where people talk about how HIV/AIDS is present in their lives now, thereby refusing to make HIV/AIDS a thing of the past. Both exhibitions featured extensive programmes of events, using the exhibition also as a social space where people can come together and engage with one other. The events ranged from film screenings and discussions to workshops where people from different communities were invited to talk about their perspectives and exchange experiences, as well as engagement with theatre groups from mostly marginalised communities that develop plays based on their own experiences with the health care system and their perspectives on HIV/AIDS. This also feeds into an understanding of the Schwules Museum not just as an archive, but also as a dynamic arsenal from which people can draw inspiration.
Engaging with the present is an important aspect of the museum’s work. The aforementioned HIV/AIDS exhibitions are part of the attempt to challenge seemingly unified ways of telling history/ies. Both refuse to understand HIV/AIDS as a simple success story with White gay men in the centre, but try to explore the related complexities, ambiguities, and multitude of experiences and activisms. While doing so, they also transcend the mostly gay-identity-based museum at the time of its founding, embracing the original impetus of challenging hegemonic interpretations and referencing alternative experiences that are often less represented. Both exhibitions do this but approach it somewhat differently. HIVstories drew upon the work done by the collaborative research project, expanding the scope by showing some of the materials and interviews they gathered. arcHIV, on the other hand, was more inward-looking, trying to explore the museum’s HIV/AIDS collection and finding new and previous overlooked perspectives and experiences. Both exhibitions struggled with similar challenges: how to convey the intensity and energy of activism and lived experience, how to incorporate experiences that did not have the opportunity to be recorded, how to discuss the complexities and fluidities of experiences and identities when there is always the problem of reproducing and thereby petrifying them, and how to deal with the pitfalls of historicization. They both ponder the question: How to remember something that is ongoing? Neither exhibition had complete, exhaustive answers to these challenges, but in the end, both took an important step toward making remembrance multifaceted instead of narrowing. If one imagines queer as the power to imagine more, they both try to queer the way HIV/AIDS as well as queer history is often told. They also attempt to fill a small part of the silence by providing a glimpse into lives and struggles shaped by the epidemic through the use of art, archives and oral history. In this sense, the exhibitions become drops in the wider pool of HIV/AIDS remembrance. Drops which hopefully also nurture a seed of future activism as well as inspiration for people to record their own histories so that there continue to be even more stories to tell in the times to come.