medicine

Interview

Facing the HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Q&A with Kimberly Vrudny

by John Shorb

This article was featured in the Winter 2011: HIV/AIDS and the Church print issue. Click here to see the complete table of contents.

Written by John Shorb on December 12, 2011

John Shorb

John Shorb is the founder of Church Health Reader and served as editor from 2008-2011. He is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Visit him online at johnshorb.com.

See all articles by John Shorb.

While reading about the great plague of 1347, Kimberly Vrudny noticed striking parallels between that plague and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, especially in relation to the church’s quietism. Vrudny, who is a professor of systematic theology and project director for HIV/AIDS initiatives at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, knew she had to address the pandemic in her work. For the past decade, Vrudny has immersed herself in an interdisciplinary study of theology, including public health, humanitarian engagement, and documentary photography. She traveled the world to meet different people living with, affected by, or responding to HIV/AIDS. She started, though, at home, in the Twin Cities, by volunteering in a local non-profit, and from there, by flying to South Africa, Thailand, and Mexico. She took a recorder and her camera, capturing people’s stories and portraits. This work resulted in the photographs and scholarly essays that comprise “30 Years / 30 Lives,” a project that commemorates the 30-year anniversary of HIV/AIDS. As the number of victims of AIDS rises to 33 million, her work is a call-to-action to address the pandemic today. Church Health Reader spoke with her about her exhibition and the role of art in public health and theology.

John Shorb: Why did you call the exhibition “30 years / 30 lives”?

Kimberly Vrudny: At its heart, the idea of the project has been to collect stories and photographs from thirty people who consented to involvement in the project in order to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the CDC’s announcement about the new virus that had entered the human community. I shortened “30 Years / 30 Lives” to “30/30” on the website to play with the idea of vision. Strong vision, of course, is considered to be “20/20.” Stronger vision is 15/20; weaker vision is 100/20. To have “30/30” vision, though, would mean we have recalibrated the scale entirely. I think this is an apt metaphor for what the project aspires to accomplish. I am trying to help us recalibrate our vision. I am asking us to see differently. I am hoping that we will begin to see all human life as precious, as possessing inherent dignity, as having infinite value and worth. If we believed this, I think we would prioritize things differently in our world. I think we would mobilize against those things that threaten human life, the things that we seem to have come to accept as “just the way things are.”

What did you learn in the process of creating this work?

Johann Baptist Metz, a Catholic theologian, once said that social realities, like the situation we are facing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, ought to “interrupt” us—especially those of us writing theology from positions of relative comfort and privilege.

Once I had identified the structural drivers of the pandemic—things like religious fundamentalism, hunger, xenophobia, violence against women, inequitable access to health care, inequitable access to education, mistreatment of vulnerable persons (elders and orphans), AIDS denialism, political violence and human trafficking, I contacted organizations responding to these social issues. After thoroughly introducing my project and the ethical principles I would follow, administrators from consenting organizations invited three people affiliated with their programs to share their stories. They wrote their perceptions about HIV/AIDS at 30 into a common journal, and then sat for a portrait.

In so doing, I met a boy in Guguletu, South Africa, who never expected to see his seventh birthday; a man in Samarra, South Africa, who went blind due to an opportunistic infection and who feared for his daughter’s safety—he feared that she would be asked to exchange sex for a slice of bread; and a girl in Thailand who had been deceived into sex slavery when she responded to an ad to wash dishes at a restaurant an hour outside of her village. These stories interrupted me. They helped me to see how all of us are interconnected in an intricate web of existence. They inspired me to live with greater integrity and to advocate for human rights globally and locally.

You’re also working on an accompanying book that looks at HIV/AIDS theologically. What do you think are some of the starting points for approaching HIV/AIDS theologically?

“30 Years / 30 Lives” grows out of a conviction that the basic problem with how the public reacted to the pandemic initially, and continues to respond to this day in many ways, is fundamentally a problem of vision. By peering at the pandemic’s victims as expendable, many in the human community displayed a troubling lack of insight. Many of these rationalized their responses on religious grounds, suggesting God was punishing people for homosexuality, or for sins of promiscuity. Some, however, demonstrated an alternative way of seeing. Where others saw deformity, some recognized the dignity of people living with HIV. Where others saw a lacking of being, some noticed the value that is inherent in every human life. Where others observed nothingness, some responded with compassion to the diminished and vulnerable state of another human being. So, for me, the starting point became: Are humans of infinite value and worth? If so, in what is their dignity grounded? Is it in one’s morality? In one’s contribution to society? In one’s very existence—in one’s being?

These are theological questions. In approaching them, I am attempting to enter into an alternative theological imagination—a different way of understanding ourselves and our relationship to God and to one another. My method of “thinking theologically” is informed by the field of theological aesthetics—which essentially is an effort to retrieve “Beauty” as a name for God. For me, Beauty is a name for the Logos of God who became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. Once we have done this, a new set of questions emerges: How is this dimension of the Trinity related to the Father and the Spirit / to Goodness and Truth? When Beauty becomes incarnate in Christ, what do we see? What does Beauty look like? In Christ, we see resistance to structural forms of oppression. We see engagement with the poor, the widow, the orphan, the leper, the prostitute—all of whom have parallels in an age of AIDS. We see a posture of embrace and acceptance, of forgiveness, and of restoration into community. These are significant observations, and have great implication for those of us who desire to call ourselves followers.

What good is photography and art in the fight against HIV/AIDS? OR What place does beauty and art have in such a dire situation?

Do you know the image of Hector Pieterson—the boy who was shot during the student uprising in Soweto in 1976? The photographer who captured the image of the dead boy was able to mobilize the world’s opinion against apartheid. From the moment it was published in newspapers across the world, corporations increasingly divested from South Africa, which eventually contributed to the fall of the regime. His was a photograph that literally changed the world.

There are a host of these images, from the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib to Sebastiao Salgado’s iconic images of famine in the Sahel. These powerful images have heightened awareness about an issue, and have mobilized global response. My portraits are not documentary images in this way, but they are portraits of individual lives that give dimension and story to the statistics that can easily overwhelm. When I hear about 33 million people living with the virus, more than half of whom are living still without access to life-saving and life-prolonging medications, my mind cannot fathom how to respond. But when I read participant 11 say, “Can anyone help me? Please, can anyone help me?,” I hope that people say, “Yes. Of course I can.” And then they’ll search in themselves for a way to become involved—whether that is by serving in their own community, donating to one of the organizations that participated in “30/30,” or putting feet to pavement to demand equity here in America, over the border, or overseas.

“30 Years / 30 Lives” invites viewers to envision the world anew. I hope it will empower us to breathe a more equitable and peaceful common existence into being.

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HIV/AIDS
interview
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