VIRAL INTIMACIES
Exhibition
September 11 – November 16, 2025
Opening: September 10, 2025, 6 pm

Press preview: September 10, 2025, 11 am
Please register by email at: presse@ngbk.de

More than four decades into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, biomedical treatment and prevention have become widely available in many parts of the world, but access remains uneven, and stigma persists. The group exhibition VIRAL INTIMACIES, which opens at nGbK as part of Berlin Art Week in September, confronts how the virus continues to shape life today—across bodies, borders, and the politics of care. Featuring video installations, paintings, sound works, performances, and sculptural pieces by 13 international contemporary artists, the exhibition explores HIV/AIDS not as a closed historical chapter but as a living reality. The show foregrounds intimacy as a political and aesthetic lens, centering voices and perspectives historically excluded from dominant narratives about HIV/AIDS.

Despite major scientific advances, the realities of living with HIV remain shaped by uneven access, stigma, and structural neglect. VIRAL INTIMACIES addresses HIV/AIDS not only as a medical condition, but as a deeply social and political issue—one that continues to shape bodies, relationships, and public life across geographies. The exhibition invites reflection on how the virus intersects with race, gender, sexuality, migration, and class, and foregrounds artistic practices that reclaim memory, dignity, and agency. In doing so, it also ties in with past nGbK projects such as Vollbild AIDS (1988) and LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX (2013/14).

The selected artworks reflect a wide range of personal and collective experiences with HIV. They include video installations, paintings, sound works, performances, and sculptural pieces. Many of the artists draw on autobiographical material or collaborate with communities impacted by the virus. Themes include personal and collective memory, the politics of medication and health infrastructures, experiences of stigma and hypervisibility, and HIV’s intersectionalities.

Participating artists include Kia LaBeija, who honours her HIV positive parents and grieves their deaths in her new work consisting of poetry, text and a photograph. Camilo Acosta and Santiago Lemus’s project Los Amarillos reflects on the physical and emotional side effects of low-quality HIV medication in Colombia. Kat Cheairs exposes natural footage to archival voices by women of colour to approach the intersection of incarceration and HIV/AIDS activism. Manuela Solano’s nostalgic and provocative paintings address Solano’s way of perceiving the world after an HIV-related infection. Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo’s video work centres the experiences of a Black woman living with HIV in Germany. Other contributions include Hanna Schaich’s reflections on personal memory, works by Jorge Bordello, Pascale Espinosa, and Ivan L. Munuera on the use of medication to treat and prevent HIV, Samuel Perea-Díaz’s engagement with the sonic dimensions of AIDS mortality data, and Ato Kwamina Hasford’s decolonial approaches to queerness and healing.

The accompanying public program challenges the widespread assumption that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is over. It creates space for discussion, reflection, and exchange across disciplines and communities—through performances, film screenings, workshops, and talks. Highlights include a performance by Naya de Souza, a screening of Zoe Mavroudi’s documentary on HIV criminalization in Greece, and a lecture-performance by Madi Awadalla, which traces the origin story of AIDS back to Berlin. Additional contributors include performer Federica Dauri, filmmaker Carla Simón, and the performance ConTatto by Federica Dauri, Hanna Schaich, Luca Della Corta, and Alain Nouchy. A key part of the program is a series of workshops with young people and school classes, designed to raise awareness and encourage open dialogue about HIV/AIDS as an ongoing social issue.

Artists: Camilo Acosta & Santiago Lemus, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Jorge Bordello, Kat Cheairs, Naya de Souza, Pascale Espinosa, Ato Kwamina Hasford, Kia LaBeija, Ivan L. Munuera, Samuel Perea-Díaz, Hanna Schaich, Manuela Solano

nGbK work group: Madi Awadalla, Pascale Espinosa, Elisabeth Krämer, Samuel Perea-Díaz, Hanna Schaich, and Max Schnepf

nGbK
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13, 10178 Berlin, 1st floor (access via escalator)
Opening hours: Tue–Sun 12–6 pm, Fri 12–8 pm
Free admission
Accessible with wheelchairs and strollers (via elevator)
Detailed information on accessibility is available here.
Information for visitors is available here.

Viral Intimacies is supported in part by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and by the Embassy of Spain in Germany.

In cooperation with The Berlin Project Fund for Arts Education (Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung), Fundación “la Caixa”, and Kéré Foundation

Partner of Berlin Art Week