Angela Bailey, Visual AIDS 2015 curatorial resident



Visual AIDS is thrilled to announce that Angela Bailey will be our third curatorial resident, co-sponsored by Visual AIDS and Residency Unlimited. Bailey is from Australia and recently co-curated the exhibition “Vital Signs--Interpreting the Archive” at the Blindside Gallery in Melbourne. Bailey outlines her previous projects and her goals for the residency below:

I am excited at the prospect of working and collaborating with Visual AIDS. My curatorial and photographic/art practice has always been informed from the perspective of the community and the cultural. From my beginnings as a young activist participating in the fight for gay law reform in Queensland in the late 1980s through to working as director of the visual arts for the Midsumma Festival (Melbourne’s gay and lesbian festival) in the late 1990s, I have long worked to promote and interpret our rich and diverse histories by creating exhibitions, installations, discourse and public programs for engagement.

My curatorial and art practice was formed at a community level and now extends to longer-term cultural projects with both larger institutional exhibitions and collaborative ventures. I have a masters of art curatorship from the University of Melbourne and am vice president of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) and actively involved in promoting this rich collection to a wider audience.

I am interested in the cultural, collective and community memory that reflects on events/archives, artworks, artists and how we continually reinterpret their significance in the ongoing history of HIV/AIDS. This philosophy considers the nuances around the “future of nostalgia” and how the archive/collection intersects with the contemporary. By exploring how this then relates to contemporary art collaborations and potential intersections with archive collection, I would ideally like to create an exhibition of cultural and collective memory that engages the Visual AIDS archive and collaborates with ALGA.

Bailey will be in residence with Visual AIDS in March 2015.

Launched in 2012, Visual AIDS and Residency Unlimited joined efforts to host a one-month residency program for a curator, art historian, or arts writer interested in the intersection of visual art and HIV/AIDS. The curatorial residency encourages the development of exhibitions, programs, and scholarship about HIV/AIDS and contemporary art.

The resident curator conducts research in Visual AIDS’s archives with access to slides, digital images, publications and other resources. The archives hold over 17,000 digital and slide images by 643 artists living with HIV and the estates of artists who have passed away. Studio visits with artists are encouraged, and the resident curator creates an online exhibition.