Gothenburg
Sweden
Världskulturmuseet, Södra Vägen 54 Swedish AIDS Memorial Quilt since 1 December 1989
27 names
Exhibition No Name Fever - Aids in the Age of Globalization at the Världskulturmuseet/Museum of World Culture (2004-2007)
The exhibition No Name Fever – Aids in the Age of Globalization provided an in-depth study, challenging the silence, the myths and the socio-economic issues surrounding the hiv/aids pandemic. Former Museum Director Jette Sandahl initiated the exhibition as one of the opening exhibitions of the museum on the December 27, 2004. She saw the exhibition as 'a microcosm of our era’s unsolved economic and power-related relationships, encompassing all the mechanisms, antagonisms and conflicts of globalization'. The exhibition had reached 230 000 people, many of them teenagers and young adults, when it closed June 18, 2007.
Two Aids Memorial quilts were part of the exhibition, one from Sweden and one from the Philippines. Several of the art works included in the exhibition are today part of the museum collections. The collection of Swedish Aids memorial quilts, (numbered 2010.01) consists of two quilts 360 x 360 cm and 11 individual panels 90 x 180 cm, was donated by Noaks Ark/The Names Project Sweden in 2010.
The exhibition, designed by the Danish company KHR Arkitekter, was a mix of personal testimonies, factual information, films, photographs, craftwork, campaign material, fine art, sculpture and music from around the world. The political and poetic content was structured around seven emotive themes: denial, fear, anger, lust, sorrow, despair and hope. The title of the exhibition “No Name Fever” was derived from the refusal of the Chinese authorities to acknowledge the disease when people first began showing symptoms, contracted from the contaminated blood sold by poor farmers to illegal collectors.
The exhibition was underpinned with substantial research by an interdisciplinary team of academics, activists and policy makers. It was a collaborative project led by The Museum of World Culture and Museion at the Göteborg University, which also resulted in a publication including 13 scholarly papers. A reduced part of the exhibition travelled to Red Location Museum in Port Elisabeth, South Africa. One of the Swedish Aids quilt was included in this exhibition which was shown between December 14, 2007 and November 30, 2008.
The photograph shows a Swedish Aids Quilt on the wall and a Philippine Aids Quilt on the ground. Photo © Världskulturmuseet

27 December 2004
Christine Palmgren, Göteborg