The artist Anya Gallaccio has won a competition to create a permanent HIV/Aids memorial in London more than 40 years after the UK’s first Aids case was reported in December 1981.
The memorial, Gallaccio’s first permanent public commission in the UK, will be located on South Crescent in Fitzrovia close to the former Middlesex Hospital where the UK’s first dedicated Aids unit was opened by Princess Diana in 1987. The other artists shortlisted were Harold Offeh, Shahpour Pouyan, Diana Puntar and Ryan Gander. The panel judges included the writer Olivia Laing and the artist Rana Begum.
“Gallaccio’s proposal features a tree trunk from which rings have been extracted from the core and displayed upright nearby. The resulting hollow space invites visitors to interact and engage with the memorial and serves as a reminder of those who have been lost to HIV/Aids,” says a project statement. Another tree close by stands upright as part of the installation. The artist says that “the proposal, as it stands, is a holding space with the intention of providing a meeting place, a heart for community-generated events and oral histories”.
Anya Gallaccio's winning proposal for The AIDS Memorial London Image: © Anya Gallaccio and Rinehart Herbst
The new work will be partly funded by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has pledged £130,000 funding from the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm towards it. Ash Kotak, the founder of Aids Memory UK, the charity behind the planned memorial, says in a statement: “Now is the time for Londoners and friends of this great city to come together to fundraise and build this important new public art work. It will survive longer than all of us and remain a tribute to the epoch we are all living through—a time of HIV and Aids—as we fight on to its end.”
Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK, is due to host the largest exhibition to date of Anya Gallaccio’s work this autumn (28 September-12 January 2025). She was nominated for the Turner prize in 2003.
