It’s too hot to move and it’s too hot to think. Those words perfectly sum up the reason why productivity drops off the graph at the height of a Durban summer. From the middle of December until the end of January not a whole lot gets done in eThekwini that doesn’t have to do with christmas shopping, post-christmas sales or sorting out tax returns. February isn’t any cooler – in fact it’s when the thermometer is at its most erect – but the year has to start at some point. And occasionally, at the end of even the hottest of days, a cool breeze from who knows where will drift past, providing the briefest of respites and offering, above all, the promise of winter – when work and making things becomes a much more pleasant prospect.
There was no promise of winter at the Durban Art Gallery for the opening of Not Alone: An international project of Make Art Stop Aids, the air-conditioning no match for the breath and body heat generated by the packed gallery. The exhibition, which first showed in Los Angele’s Fowler Museum, is unusual for a museum show in that it is re-curated as it moves around the globe. (Even the title Not Alone, has been added to the Durban leg, and will probably stay as it moves around South Africa and then to India and Brazil).
In his opening speech David Gere, who co-curated the remarkable show with former DAG director Carol Brown, commented on the large crowd, saying that such numbers would never be present at an opening in LA. He also remarked on what an extraordinary institution the Durban Art Gallery is. Later, speaking to him on the balcony of one of Durban’s grand old houses – designed and built to provide respite from a summer in the colonies and now a guesthouse from heaven – he expanded on his comments, saying that he has not seen a public institution anywhere in the world engage with the epidemic with the intensity and breadth of the Durban art gallery, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that it was a public body exhibiting work that was – until very recently – mostly at odds with national policies.
With such an exhibition, it’s tempting to point out standout works, but the curatorial consistency of Not Alone was so rigorous – without being smooth – that I think it’s fair to say that every piece contributed equally to a show about a microscopic virus on a small planet and the infinite human responses to the epidemic. At the same time, size and immediacy are often the parameters for determining which works from a show leave the most impact and visitors to Not Alone are unlikely to forget the astounding Kieskama altarpiece, created by the residents of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape where most of the community is infected by HIV and the entire community affected. (The work, which has spent the last few years touring cathedrals in the United States was not part of the LA show because it was too large.)
Neither will audiences be quick to forget Daniel Goldstein’s strangely ethereal Medicine Man – constructed from syringes and medical bottles used over the course of more than two decades of living with HIV – or Brenton Maart’s large format work Crossword which was both cryptic and confontational, depicting events in a gay sex club. In our balcony conversation Gere suggested Maart’s piece was a vitally important element of the show - not the least because it acknowledges the explicit nature of sex and the virus in a country where millions are infected and the sex lives of our politicians hog the headlines but we still don’t want to talk intimately about the sexual act.

The piece from Maart, who is curator of the KZNSA Gallery, was one of two important works from local curators of contemporary spaces. The other work came from Robert Fraser of Bank Gallery, and despite knowing Rob well and reading the work’s title notes, I still somehow presumed that the work had come from LA and was part of the initial wave of late 80s art produced in response to the virus. It was only when chatting to Bank co-curator Henrietta Hamilton that I realised that it was Rob (my brain doesn’t easily do surnames) who had made the work. Entitled Separation, the elegantly simple piece consisted of a frame of black tape which contained a small corner of the gallery, and which, on the simplest level, talks about how easily and arbitrarily we divide ourselves from each other. It also engaged beautifully with the baroque architecture of the gallery, and like the broader project of Make Art Stop Aids, will change with each venue in which it shows.
Fraser is hardly the first artist to make effective use of plastic tape as a framing device but in the context of Not Alone, the piece worked to beautiful effect, reducing the entire human world and all its viruses and prejudices into a simple line which dared you to cross it. And I had a lot of fun jumping back and forth over that line, moving in and out of the picture, in and out of art.