From this Thursday, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall will house one of the UK’s largest works of folk art – the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt. A British cousin to the far more well-known (and well-funded) US AIDS Memorial Quilt, the UK Quilt was conceived in 1989 by the Scottish gay activist Alastair Hume. Having seen the US Quilt in San Francisco, Hume returned to Edinburgh where he quickly got to work on forming its British equivalent. Both Quilts follow the same principles: each panel serves as a tribute to an individual who lost their life to HIV/AIDS, typically created by loved ones who decorate it in a way that honours the person’s memory. Every panel is the same size, its dimensions roughly equal to those of a standard grave. Some panels are simple, others intricate. Some are solemn, others celebratory.

The UK Quilt was a huge moment for gay activism in early 1990s Britain, culminating in its display, alongside panels from the US Quilt, in Hyde Park in June 1994. However, once antiretrovirals were introduced to the UK in 1996, meaning that HIV/AIDS was no longer a death sentence, the UK Quilt was packed up, put into storage, and left to slowly perish for two decades. Reflecting a common line of thinking at the time that antiretrovirals signalled the end of the “AIDS era”, the UK Quilt has become something of a tactile metaphor for the willingness of many to simply move on and try to forget about one of the world’s deadliest epidemics.

In 2014, the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership was formed under the auspices of Siobhán Lanigan, who has worked tirelessly to prevent the Quilt from degrading further and to put it on display as often as the Quilt allows. However, for many of us, the existence of a UK AIDS Quilt is brand new information. It was only upon reading Charlie Porter’s recent debut novel, Nova Scotia House – which follows a gay man reflecting on his relationship with an older man in the early 90s, with the Quilt playing a significant role toward the novel’s end – that many first became aware of its existence. Porter has been the initiator of the Quilt’s display in the Turbine Hall this weekend. In the lead-up to the Quilt’s most significant and public display since Hyde Park in 1994, we talked to Porter about this truly significant moment in the long history of HIV/AIDS in the UK.

Barry Pierce: Could you tell a bit about your relationship with the Quilt?
Charlie Porter: I was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s, and I self-educated through magazines like The Face and i-D, so I was very aware of global counterculture in my bedroom in the middle of nowhere. Those magazines were like a portal. So, the Quilt was something that I was aware of as part of the literal fabric of the AIDS crisis at that time. The Quilt was started in America by an activist called Cleve Jones, and it began as a way to commemorate those who died from AIDS-related causes because often, those who died at the time weren’t given funerals because either their families rejected them or the funeral homes refused to take their bodies for fear of infection. The Quilt gave people a chance to commemorate their loved ones and help process what they were living through. It offered a chance for people to grieve.
In 1996, when treatments were introduced that made it possible to live a full life with HIV, that basically meant that people stopped dying. So, there were no more panels being added to the Quilt. It went into storage for almost two decades and, basically, what happened was a collective of volunteers from different HIV charities got together to get it out of storage, for many different reasons. To make sure that those who died aren’t forgotten, but also to talk about HIV stigma today and the fact that the AIDS crisis still continues around the world.

“The Quilt gave people a chance to commemorate their loved ones and help process what they were living through.”

BP: I find it so surprising, but also I suppose I don’t, that while the US Quilt is seen as a hugely significant document of the AIDS crisis and is something that, I think, many people are aware of… the UK Quilt was quickly packed away and, essentially, forgotten about. Isn’t that sort of shocking?
CP: Yeah, I mean the reason is that the US Quilt was set up as a charitable organisation pretty quickly. And so people were donating to the Quilt and donating to its upkeep. That charity continues through to today. There was an infrastructure built around the US Quilt. In the UK, everything was done much more on a volunteer basis. It’s hard to convey what it was like at the time, but when antiretrovirals were introduced, it was almost like people just wanted to forget about it. There wouldn’t have been the energy in ’96 for people to be like, “Hey, let’s raise the funds to keep this going.” I can totally understand how it happened. Society just wanted to move on. But now, it’s about what we can do to get the Quilt properly looked after, conserved, and in a permanent home. Part of the ambition of the Tate display is to put it back in the national conversation and to focus on its future.

“Part of the ambition of the Tate display is to put it back in the national conversation and to focus on its future.”

BP: It feels like the UK Quilt has ended up being a great metaphor for that era when antiretrovirals and everyone wanted to just quickly move on — that there’s this very major relic of the AIDS era that everyone just didn’t want to see or hear about anymore.
CP: Exactly. And if you look at something like Queer as Folk, which was an incredibly important TV show, it doesn’t talk about HIV/AIDS at all because society had moved on. Often, I think, there needs to be some time before you can really look back at something. I think now enough time has passed to be able to really take account for what happened during those years, between ’81 and ’96. A huge part of why I wrote Nova Scotia House is that I believe that the effects of the AIDS crisis go deep into culture and society, deep into the way that we live. I think that the Quilt can help us tease this out and really look at the devastation of the AIDS crisis and the absence of all those people who could have contributed to culture, who could have contributed to society, and what is missing because of their deaths. How can we account for this? Particularly in forms like fashion, art, literature, and counterculture.

BP: How significant is it that the Quilt is going on display specifically in Tate Modern?
CP: I mean, it’s wildly significant. The history of the Quilt is that it is in iconic locations, like the US Quilt on the National Mall in Washington, and in the UK there is no more iconic location than the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. As a symbol of commemorating those people who died, to have the Quilt placed in this iconic location, it’s really profound. But then it’s also to do with the Quilt being placed in an art context as well. It raises questions about art itself and the recent commodification of art, how most conversations about art now tend to revolve around “value” in terms of how much a piece costs, how much it’ll get at auction. Contemporary art discourse has got so much capitalism within it. The Quilt is the world’s largest community art project. It’s an ongoing art project, and it asks us to look at our understanding of what art is.

BP: What are you hoping will be the result of the Quilt going on display like this?
CP: Hopefully, the results are very personal and individual. But also societal. Hopefully for individuals coming, if they’ve lost loved ones during the AIDS crisis, it’ll be a chance for them to grieve and to process their thoughts. It’s a chance for catharsis for many people. For younger generations, it’s a chance for education and understanding. But on a societal point, it’s the beginning of a conversation about the Quilt as this vital social document, one of the most important pieces of social documentation in this country in the last few decades.

As part of the display in Tate Modern, a documentary titled There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, will be screened. Documenting the Quilt’s display in Hyde Park in 1994, the film was considered lost until one of its filmmakers found it again recently on an old VHS. In Porter’s words, the documentary was offered to numerous TV channels and none of them had any interest in it. The documentary was screened amongst friends but never shown publicly. It will now be screened on the hour, every hour at the Starr Cinema in the Tate.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display from June 12th until 16th in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern