AIDS quilts at the Tate: reflection and anger

Simon Collins, HIV i-Base

From 12-16 June 2025, for four days, more than 300 quilts filled the far end of the vast Turbine Hall at Tate Modern on London’s Bankside. [1]

Each panel is a memorial to someone who died from AIDS and is a celebration of their life.

More than 75,000 visitors came specifically to remember or were just lucky enough to visit while the display was on.

The panels include almost 400 lovers, friends, brothers, sisters, parents and children, together with some of the organisations involved in HIV care.

They are carefully stitched, many including favourite t-shirts or dance shorts, memories and last messages: “Malcolm, I wish I had known you longer”.

Many only include first names and several remain anonymous because the stigma and fear of HIV continued even after they had died. The dates on each panel reflect the most difficult years, mainly from the late 80s through to the mid 90s. This was just before effective treatment arrived – suddenly – and for most people unexpectedly. Far too late, but still in time to save many.

The quilts are also a living project and new panels are still being added with workshops were included as part of the exhibition to make new quilts.

The late Chris Birch, writing of the panel he helped make for Mark Ashton and of the workshops run at the London Lighthouse in the early 90s, explained how the quilts “helped in the grieving process for those who had lost friends and partners”. [2]

Collectively the quilts democratise the Tate with this expansive collaborative community artwork, that had such emotional impact that many visitors were in tears.

But early on Thursday morning when the exhibition first opened, US activist Cleve Jones who founded the Names Project in San Francisco in 1987, said that the US AIDS memorial quilts were also an activist resource for achieving better care and for raising support for HIV organisations.

He linked the anger in the 1980s that grew from the lack of an early US government response to HIV to a similar need for anger in 2025. Since 20 January, the new US administration has dismantled USAID and cancelled thousands of programmes it funded, including HIV treatment and prevention projects in more than 50 countries. This includes threatening PEPFAR, which provides antiretroviral treatment (appropriately called ART) to more than 20 million people globally.

The experience of viewing the quilts will hopefully encourage people to actively support responses to tackle HIV now. This included the reading on Saturday of more than 300 names by HIV activists working on issues today.

As with any art, everyone brings their own response to seeing these quilts. More than 25,000 people died from AIDS in the UK, so each of these panels really represents 80 people, whose memories, for a short time, filled this vast gallery.

The US Memorial Quilt also continues to grow and currently includes more than 98,000 panels, featuring nearly 110,000 individual names, also viewable online. [3]

My own response included a sense of gratitude that so many people continue to be remembered. I have never made a quilt and most of the friends I lost were not keen on the idea. They didn’t want to be remembered in a quilt – they wanted to live. But I visited several times, and I also wept later, from the enormity of loss both then and since.

HIV memorials are important and are already in Brighton, Bournemouth, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and the Birchgrove Woodland near Swindon. Plans to establish a permanent AIDS memorial in central London are also finally being realised. [4]

It would also be appropriate for the quilts to return again to the Tate for a longer exhibition, perhaps in 2030, the target for ending HIV transmissions in the UK. And as with other exhibitions, it might tour to other UK galleries.

Thanks to Marco V. Pereira (@mvpicsss) for the beautiful photographs of the quilts at sunset.

References

Tate Modern press release. UK AIDS Memorial Quilt goes on show in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. (12 June 2025).
https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/uk-aids-memorial-quilt-goes-on-show-in-tate-moderns-turbine-hall
AIDS quilt UK
https://www.aidsquiltuk.org
US AIDS Memorial Quilt.
quiltindex.org
AIDS Memory London.
aidsmemory.uk