Getting the Message Across: Art and Craft in the Service of HIV/AIDS Awareness in South Africa

The struggle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic is one of the most serious challenges South Africa faces today. Great efforts have been and are being made to create awareness of the disease, utilizing a variety of strategies that range from straightforward educational messages in magazines, billboards, and radio/TV broadcasts, to more creative or artistic approaches in media such as film, drama, music, art, and crafts. Many of these projects (notably the Sarafina II drama production) have drawn criticism of some sort, usually focused on the perceived efficacy of the project, especially in relation to its cost or usage of resources. There sometimes appears to be an implicit expectation that HIV/AIDS awareness projects must state the “message” in simple, blunt, or easily comprehensible terms to “reach” people. This can be argued not only to be patronizing, but to disregard the complex ways in which visual stimuli are received and processed by diverse audiences.

In this article, I will investigate three different creative visual art/craft initiatives that have been employed in South Africa in the past few years to create HIV/AIDS awareness. They comprise: first, HIV/AIDS community murals, sponsored by the Department of Health and painted primarily in townships and on university campuses throughout the country; secondly, a print portfolio/billboard project, involving local and international artists whose “fine art” prints are enlarged to billboard size and placed in high traffic areas in cities and townships; and thirdly, a craft project employing rural women in KwaZulu-Natal who produce beaded dolls, badges and wire baskets (imbenge) with an HIV/AIDS awareness message.

The theoretical framework for this study is informed by semiotics and post-structuralism. It presumes that meaning is always constructed—both by the author/artist and by the recipient/viewer. Artists may want to convey clear educational messages, using seemingly unambiguous symbols and metaphors. However, as every signifier has multiple meanings, which constantly shift and slide, an artist cannot control how individual viewers will decode the message. In view of this, I will argue that it may be short-sighted to dismiss certain types of creative art projects around HIV/AIDS as incomprehensible or inaccessible and therefore ineffective in raising awareness of the disease and associated issues such as stigmatization.