Prof. Dr. Sophie Junge: Protest and Remembrance – Keith Haring in the context of AIDS

With a good 30 years' distance, we now look back on the late 1980s and 1990s—a time of upheaval in every respect, which is also being presented, reflected upon and historicized in current exhibitions. In the United States, the fight against the AIDS epidemic played a central role in the context of the Culture Wars and found expression in an extensive artistic-activist AIDS discourse from the mid-1980s onwards. Collectives such as ACT UP and Gran Fury created a powerful visual language to protest against the ignorance of the US government and the stigmatization of people with AIDS. Keith Haring was also significantly involved in the representation of AIDS. How can his art be understood in the context of the AIDS movement? And how are his works currently received—especially with regard to their specific political content?

The lecture takes the exhibition “Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life” as the starting point for a reflection on the artistic and material memory of activist artworks from the 1980s and 1990s, whose significance is currently being re-examined between political, historical and artistic interpretations.

Sophie Junge is a substitute professor specializing in 20th century and contemporary art at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich from 2023. Her teaching and research interests lie in the history of photographic media and archives since the 19th century, the political art of the second half of the 20th century and contemporary art from Southeast Asia. Her publications include the book “Art against AIDS: Nan Goldin's Exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” (De Gruyter, 2015), the thematic issue “Photography and Colonialism” of the journal “Fotogeschichte” (2021) and the anthology “Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe” (with Erin Hyde Nolan, Routledge, 2022).

The conversation will be translated into German Sign Language (DGS).