GROUP EXHIBITION

Michael Lett is pleased to present Implicated and Immune, an exhibition that focuses on artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, both historical and contemporary, as well as offering broader meditations on desire, loss and the body. Implicated and Immune marks three decades of HIV in New Zealand and seeks to re-engage a wider public with the ongoing epidemic.

The exhibition partially reprises the first Auckland exhibition to explicitly respond to the epidemic. Implicated and Immune: Artists’ Responses to AIDS took place in late 1992 at the Fisher Gallery (now Te Tuhi) in Pakuranga, Auckland. This landmark exhibition featured work by artists including Jack Body, Fiona Clark, L. Budd, Richard Killeen and Fiona Pardington.

The new exhibition revisits these artists as well as drawing in other New Zealand practitioners including Billy Apple, Simon Denny, Russ Flatt, Jacqueline Fraser, Giovanni Intra, Imogen Taylor and Douglas Wright.

Prevention materials from the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, an organisation that for 30 years has been at the forefront of New Zealand’s community-based response to the epidemic, will also be included.

Two public conversations will be held in the gallery during the exhibition. On Saturday 31 January at 1pm, artists Ruth Watson and Trevor Fry will discuss the work of important gay artist Grant Lingard, whose final major work Swan Song will be included in the exhibition. On Saturday 14 February at 1pm, Auckland Art Gallery curator Ron Brownson and artist Fiona Clark will discuss Clark's seminal work Living with AIDS.