The article entitled “Seropositivo, el contagio con la realidad” [Seropositive: Infected by Reality] was published in the newspaper El Nuevo Siglo [The New Century] on January 20, 1994. It was a review of the exhibition of the Seropositivo (1994) installation by the Colombian artist Fernando Arias at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá. The installation contained 9,900 blood platelets that Arias had collected from a number of different hospitals. The platelets were assembled like tiles in a swimming pool, and a photograph of Arias’s naked body was shown submerged and lit by neon lights in a simulated swimming pool. The installation included four videos, projected through small holes in the exhibition space, which showed images of red and white sperm. There was also an audio track of the testimony of a man with HIV who had died two days after he was interviewed. Seropositivo was created as an exhibition about the virus for World HIV/AIDS Day in 1992. Later, when Arias was awarded a grant by the Ministry of Culture in 1993, he improved the installation for the IV Salón de Arte Joven [Fourth Salon for Young Artists]—an exhibition that was part of the XXXV Salón Nacional de Artistas [Thirty-fifth National Artists Salon] (1994) presented at the Centro de Convenciones y Negocios [Business and Convention Center] in Bogotá (Corferias)—where he received a special mention. In that same year, Arias presented Seropositivo at the V Bienal [Fifth Biennial] in Havana, Cuba, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

This document describes Seropositivo [Seropositive] (1994), the work by Fernando Arias (b. 1963), as a means of humanizing the disease, an attempt to expose the general public to the suffering, the fear, the pain, the rejection, and the “poor quality of life” of those who were affected. The tone of the article, and the way it is written, however, seem to portray the virus as something quite remote from the author’s reality. It is presented to the reader as though he or she were a spectator, someone immune to the virus. This is quite the opposite feeling to what the installation intended as it sought to involve the public in a multifaceted experience by presenting details on the syndrome’s rising rates of infection. The article also shows how the exhibition impacted the public, as a portrait of the phenomenon and as a report on the extent to which the disease had spread in those days. The exhibition was an early example of the social commentary that the visual arts pioneered in the 1990s.     

We should keep in mind that there was very little information in circulation about the HIV/AIDS virus in the 1990s, in terms of how it was transmitted and the particular groups who were at risk; in those days, most people believed that the disease was confined to dubious populations, specifically prostitutes and homosexuals. Furthermore, the low mortality rates from the disease—compared to the death rates attributed to violence, for example, in the case of Colombia, which were (to date) estimated to be up to 107 times greater—meant that the syndrome was not studied in any great depth. According to figures quoted in official reports from the Colombian Ministry of Health’s National Program for the Prevention and Control of STD/HIV/AIDS (National Epidemiological Bulletin, 1995), the first case of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the United States was recorded in 1981. The first case in Colombia was reported just two years later, in 1983, in the city of Cartagena, and a couple of other cases were recorded that same year elsewhere in the country. From then until 1994, there were 12,455 cases of AIDS confirmed.  

Fernando Arias earned a degree in advertising at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá (1987), and went on to specialize in art and design in London in 1991. He has received a number of awards for visual art work, for example from the Arts Council England?BFI Black World and Tate Modern(2005); a production grant from the Arts Council England and Live Art Development Agency, and the Prince Claus Foundation prize (both in 2004). He also received other awards in England, such as an arts grant from the Arts Council England (2004) and the Research and Development, Visual Arts Projects Award, London Arts (2002), among others. Arias, a Colombian artist, currently lives and works in New York.