Marking its 30th anniversary, Gay Health Network (GHN) launched the visual art exhibition Out of The Strong, Came Forth Sweetness – GHN30, capturing the LGBTQ+ experience and addressing HIV-related stigma from the past to the present. Margot Guilhot Delsoldato takes a look inside the exhibition and how artist Brian Teeling created the project. 

The Gay Health Network (GHN) is a network of organisations promoting HIV prevention and sexual health and wellbeing for gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with other men (MSM), founded shortly after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland. Since 1994, it has launched peer-led initiatives and actions both at the national level and in specific communities.

It has worked in conjunction with the HSE on support programmes like Man2Man.ie, spreading sexual health awareness, addressing HIV-related stigma, and commissioning key research in the area of sexual health among men who have sex with other men.

For their thirty-year anniversary, GHN partnered with multidisciplinary artist Brian Teeling and assistant curator Aisling Clark to create an exhibition exploring the histories of queer identity and HIV/AIDS in Ireland, celebrating the work of twenty-eight Irish artists and media from a series of archives.

Brian Teeling’s tendency towards the multidisciplinary comes to life in an exhibition that stretches across a multitude of mediums: print, painting, sculpture, photography, video, architecture, installation, performance.

Of the pieces that made the final cut, some came from an open call issued for the occasion, others from artists personally invited to display work; some were commissioned, others again were unearthed from the archives they had been living in since their original use: Man2Man’s, Niall Sweeney’s, Christopher Robson’s.

 

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Stitching together different artistic practices, the GHN30 exhibition Out of the Strong is a tapestry of queer memory and experience. The sheer range of the work shown is a feat in and of itself for first-time curator Teeling, who wanted to “go big or go home”.

“It’s easy to go blunt”, Teeling explained with reference to depictions of either GBMSM experiences or of AIDS. Art that joyfully and explicitly depicts queer sex and sexuality – such as Billy Quinn’s striking prints or Kian Benson Bailes’s colourful series of ceramic sculptures Squashcock I-V – plays an important role in battling stigma, especially work that addresses sex for HIV-positive individuals, and there is room for this in Out of the Strong.

What the exhibition champions above all, however, is a kind of tenderness, of earnestness: from the Irish queer community’s first, at times clumsy attempts at creating a vernacular for the public to conceptualise relationships between men, as seen in the ‘Healthy, Hot & Horny’ guide from the GHN archives, to Tonie Walsh’s collection of club flyers for “dicks, clits and others” displayed in Maremoto’s Múnlann, an installation that invokes in the viewer the same awkwardness and tension of cruising in a men’s urinal.

“You would have to print and hand these out on the street,” Teeling explained to me about the flyers. “This was pre-internet, so all the information had to be on them”. Many of the archival pieces in the exhibition serve as a reminder that GHN and the Irish queer community at large have built on a bedrock of vulnerability and learning.

Teeling subtly repurposed a few objects that populated Dublin’s gay scene around the time of GHN’s foundation and incorporated them into the GHN30 exhibition. As they performed their piece, The Fatal Obedience of the Image II, artist and writer Day Magee stood in front of a frame that once served as a prop in a different performance: The Diceman’s, when in 1991 he would walk around Dublin city centre as Mona McGinty, blowing kisses at passersby.

 

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Thom McGinty, better known as The Diceman, was a beloved Scottish-Irish performance artist who died due to complications from AIDS. In 1994, he openly discussed his ongoing battle with the disease on The Late Late Show, when the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS was at an all-time high.

Or, again, Bill Harris’s you & us, especially commissioned for Out of the Strong. The installation consists of a sling made of Irish linen and SCOBY bacteria that has been fed black tea and J-Lube. Beside it, reflecting the viewer’s image, is a mirror from The Boilerhouse Sauna, Dublin’s now-closed, first-ever gay sauna.

“If mirrors could talk”, Teeling joked as he was telling me about the piece. His and Clark’s thoughtful curation put the works displayed in the exhibition in communication not just with each other, but stretched across time to nod to those that came before, creating tributes everywhere for those with the eyes to see. “I wanted (the artworks) to be more than the sum of their parts”, as Teeling put it.

 

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Representations of HIV or queer struggle in art and media tend to be, historically speaking, fear-mongering at worst and somber at best. Works like Padraig Robinson’s A Faggot is a Unit, a calendar of source material for different projects that humorously deconstructs queer identity down to fragmentary images; or Breda Lynch’s cyanotypes, that digitally tweak homophobic American church signs to read things like ‘COC BLOCK PARTY’, cleverly counterbalance seriousness and grief with some much-needed irony.

So does Austin Hearne’s series of self-portraits, Waiting for the Man, taken in 1993, when his secret cross-dressing offered him an outlet to explore his identity in creative and light-hearted ways; or the “Cabaraids” posters from HIV Ireland’s archive.

These works echo the queer community’s undefeated ability to find levity in hardship, draw solidarity from stigma; out of the strong, comes forth sweetness. The title of the GHN30 exhibition itself is drawn from Samson’s riddle, subverting the biblical language that tabloids would use to refer to the AIDS crisis to honour the community’s undefeated joy and resilience.

One can only hope that the inauguration of the GHN30 exhibition will inspire other exhibitions celebrating the work of queer artists in Ireland. Many of the artists who were invited to show new work were able to do so thanks to the residencies and art studios across the city, funded by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, et cetera – creative hubs that provide artists with a space to live in and to pursue their practice, facilitating connection and the blossoming of these networks of support.

In conversation with Clark, she stressed the importance of the preservation of these ecosystems at a time when the cost of living is making Dublin increasingly inaccessible. Much like the queer community needs accessible spaces, the artist community does too. Out of the Strong is an example of what can happen when both are given the space they need to thrive.

The GHN30 exhibition Out of the Strong, Came Forth Sweetness runs from May 12 to 26 in the Naughton Institute in Trinity.