HAZEL COONAGH
About a month ago I met up with activist and artist Will St Leger to talk about an upcoming exhibition he’s putting together for ACT UP Dublin. The more we talked, the more I came to realise how little I knew about the extent of Ireland’s HIV crisis. There’s been a four-fold increase in new HIV diagnoses in Ireland in the last decade and no one seems to be talking about it.
Through this project we wanted to reset people’s assumptions by reminding them that HIV can affect anybody, and also to help eliminate the stigma and shame attached to it. Will put it quite simply that people seem to forget that the first letter in HIV stands for, ‘human’, but many choose to focus on the last letter, which stands for ‘virus’.