Birmingham-based artists join forces for World AIDS Day 2025

Birmingham creatives are joining forces to give voice to people living with HIV in time for this year’s World AIDS Day – and they want the wider public to pay attention.

Garry Jones, HIV activist and artist

Dancers, actors and visual artists will be performing and exhibiting their work at venues across the city centre on December 1st. And in every case the stories of people living with HIV will be front and centre.

Among the Brum-based creatives behind the effort are Jerry Dawson, dancer and choreographer who founded arts organisation Art Thou OK Bab, and Garry Jones, an artist whose work is currently on show at Birmingham’s National Trust Back To Backs.

“HIV still attracts a lot of stigma,” says Jones, who like Dawson lives with HIV himself. “1 in 10 of us have told nobody in our lives about our diagnosis. More than three quarters have suffered discrimination. That has real material and mental health impacts.”

Dawson adds: “It also affects all of us: stigma means people don’t test for HIV, and that means they get sicker than they need to, and can even pass on the virus to others. Reducing stigma can help us all.”

Centring Positive Voices

For this year’s World AIDS Day, the health-conscious artists are presenting work which tells the stories of people living with the virus, to help more people understand the realities of HIV.

Jones has helped a dozens of people design and produce quilts that are stitched with stories about HIV. They will be exhibited at the Library of Birmingham in the week before World AIDS Day. Dawson has choreographed a special dance presentation, which will be performed in Hippodrome Square on December 1st itself.

Other artistic events for the day will include a drama piece, also to be performed at the Library of Birmingham, a special set by the community choir Rainbow Voices, who will sing at Brum’s AIDS & HIV Memorial on Hurst Street, and an operatic rendition of Des’ree’s “I’m Kissing You” by professional tenor Robert Edwards.

“We’ll all be telling the true stories of people living with the virus – and their loved ones,” says Dawson. “We want to show how broad, varied and often unexpected HIV really is. People have fixed ideas about it – but anyone can and does get HIV, and we need to be better at talking about it.”

Birmingham: Leading The Country on HIV

Rachel Greaves, Service Manager for Positive Peers

The Birmingham AIDS & HIV Memorial – the focal point of this year’s World AIDS Day activity in the city – is the nation’s largest-scale monument to the people lost to HIV. It marks Birmingham about as a UK leader in HIV community work, and the city is committed to improving the testing for and treatment of the virus.

Rachel Greaves is the service co-ordinator for Positive Peers, a Midlands-wide network of people living with the virus that provides via NHS clinics and charities mentoring for people diagnosed with it.

She and the service’s parent charity, Saving Lives, are supporting the World AIDS Day efforts – and sit on the steering group of Birmingham Fast Track Cities, an effort bringing charities, healthcare and local government together to enhance HIV provision and prevention in the city.

“People often don’t understand that with today’s treatments, someone on medicine whose virus is well controlled will live a normal life expectancy and cannot pass on the virus,” she says. “New treatments are being found all the time, and the UK has a goal to eliminate new infections by 2030. There are so many positive stories to tell – so this year we’re going to shout about it!”