Vladimir Čajkovac, a curator from Zagreb, Croatia, will speak about his eighteen-month project in Dresden, where he works as a research fellow at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum on the project AIDS as a Global Media Event: An intercultural comparison of posters and their imagery, culminating in an exhibition and a series of related talks. Čajkovac’s residency in New York for the month of February is co-sponsored by Residency Unlimited and Visual AIDS.
The website of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum describes the project AIDS as a Global Media Event: An intercultural comparison of posters and their imagery and the related fellowship awarded to Vladimir Čajkovac in the following terms.
AIDS has radically transformed the world and become the focus of interdisciplinary study and research from a medical, cultural and media-historical perspective. Over the past 30 years, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden has collected numerous items – predominantly posters – which have been used in the media campaign to combat the epidemic. It is the world’s largest collection of AIDS posters with over 9,000 specimens from 100 countries. As important media documents of our times, they convey traditional values and new attitudes concerning safe sex, homosexuality, discrimination, the desire for love, the solidarity with the afflicted and the fear of death. The images and visual composition of the posters offer insights into behavioral patterns, self-images and models of the 21st century, which the fellow from the United States, Eastern Europe or an African country will investigate by means of intercultural image analysis. He or she will be responsible for researching the concrete political, economic, aesthetic and social conditions in which the posters were created, and for interviewing the designers to learn more about the wishes and desires of the target group. Step by step, the fellow will build an international network and create a keyword catalogue which can serve as the basis for further research of the poster collection.
