Queer Art and the Immaterial Griefs of the AIDS Crisis
In exhibitions in Tuscany and London, we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.
By Sam Moore • 03/21/25 8:00am
‘ “Eyes Open in the Dark,” another Hujar retrospective at Raven Row in London, shows Hujar’s work alongside images of the artist made by his contemporaries, including an almost cubist grid portrait by Paul Thek and images of Hujar on his deathbed taken by Wojnarowicz. Through this artistic communion, Hujar and those in his inner circle are able to provide us with a kind of lineage, a way to place ourselves within a timeline of queer art and artists ruptured by the AIDS crisis. In contrast to this, Hamad Butt, the subject of “Apprehensions,” a retrospective at IMMA in Dublin, moves away from solid and recognizable images of the past. Butt’s work was more explicitly informed by the AIDS crisis and his own diagnosis in 1987; in a video where the artist is interviewed by his younger brother Jamal, Hamad reveals that he was “unable to express what [he] really wanted to say because of the limitations of painting.” While Butt’s work is no less of a document of a time and community ravaged by the AIDS crisis, his work offers a much less material world for us to grieve, instead trying to capture a precarious landscape through more abstract forms or those that foreground Butt’s own proximity to death.’
“What might bring these artists together isn’t just the way in which, in vastly different visual languages, they show a world that came undone under the shadow of death and plague, but instead, questions of memory: how is it we can remember what’s been lost? Whether intentionally or not, there’s a moment in “Apprehensions” that echoes Hujar’s practice. When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait, offering up a part of himself to us as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Butt’s work understands how fragile and precarious things are, showing them in real-time through ambitious, unsettling installations. It’s these moments, where whatever space there might be between life and death feels so thin that we might be able to glimpse through it if we try hard enough, that Hujar seems to freeze in time. So much of his work is dedicated to the moments of life that are lived in between. This can be seen in his images of performers—Hujar’s images from Italy capture the transience and transformation of live performance like little else—and landscapes; in one of the final rooms of the Raven Row is a series of Hujar’s photos of the Hudson River, the portraits and faces that we so often associate with his work are gone, and we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.”
