John Walter has applied his maximalist aesthetic onto the subject of HIV in Alien Sex Club (2015), which addressed sexual health as a crisis of visual representation, and CAPSID (2018), which looked at the biological mechanics of the virus. HIV has informed his current interest in viruses of the mind such as the Paisley Pattern or the memes that religious cults use to recruit participants.

Instagram: @johnwalterstudio

Website: www.johnwalter.net

Hatty Carman is a London based musician and visual artist. Her work has been featured in Dazed Beauty, LOVE magazine, Cause & Effect, Out There and Strike magazine. In May 2018, Dazed & Confused named her as one of London’s creative breakouts, alongside ten other artists.  

Instagram: hatty.carman 

David Gwinnutt is a British photographer, artist and designer who was part of London’s 1980s club scene. His work is known for its intimate nature, revealing an unseen side to his subjects, which are drawn from London’s art world and queer scene. He has photographed amongst others, Quentin Crisp, Derek Jarman, Gilbert and George, Leigh Bowery, Edmund White, Maggie Hambling, Rupert Everett and John Schlesinger.

Instagram: thedavidgwinnutt 

Website: www.davidgwinnutt.com 

An independent publishing house which helps hidden voices be heard. 

Polari was a secret language from the early 1900s when homosexuality was still criminalised in the UK. Spoken almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, the nature of clandestine meetings brought together people from all walks of life, who all had an influence on the language. 

Instagram: @polaripress 

Website: Home — Polari 

Chiara Ambrosio is a London-based Filmmaker and visual artist, working across media to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, and articulate personal and collective histories and a sense of place. Her work pays witness to that which struggles on the fringes of dominant narratives- communities, landscapes, stories, objects, perceptions, sensibilities excluded and marginalised for a variety of different reasons but always fundamental to our understanding of what makes us human. 

Instagram: @chiaraambrosiovisualartist  

Linder is known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage, and confrontational performance art. Emerging from the Manchester punk and post-punk scenes in the 1970s, Linder focuses on questions of gender, commodity and display. Her highly recognisable photomontage practice combines everyday images from domestic or fashion magazines with images from pornography and other archival material.  

Instagram: @lindersterling  

Fredde Lanka is a gay Swedish proto-bear illustrating smutty, silly comics for the queer gamer generation who don’t read Foucault. A university lecturer and youth worker with his own queer art school in London (Queer Youth Art Collective), Christian moms have warned that Lanka is teaching the children an ‘asses up lifestyle’.

Instagram: @freddelanka 

Website: www.freddelanka.com  

CozCon is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Through work that often braids together the languages of pop, queer and black culture, Coz aims to, in the words of Toni Cade Bambarra, “make the revolution irresitable”. Much of their work is created in collaboration with organizations and nonprofits such as CultureStrike, Forward Together, Sons & Brothers and Planned Parenthood. 

Instagram: @cozcon  

Edd Carr is an artist from the North York Moors, UK. Adapting photographic processes into moving image – his work depicts our relationship to ecological crisis and the wider nonhuman world. Edd’s moving image work has been exhibited worldwide, including Holland, Australia, Germany, Japan, Korea, the USA, and the UK. 

Instagram: @_eddcarr_ 

Website: www.eddcarr.co.uk  

In the summer of 2022 and 2023, Positive East hosted Q-MART to celebrate art and HIV activism. The day long event saw over 30 artists take over the Positive East building to raise awareness of their work, and celebrate the richness of the queer art community.   

In the summer of 2020, Positive East approached 14 artists, both local and international, whose works are rooted in tackling social injustice, championing LGBTQ+ equality and fighting HIV stigma, to create an image that they felt represented the mission of the Charity. Contributing artists included Wolfgang Tillmans, Linder, Sunil Gupta, Lubaina Himid, Hatty Carmen and AA Bronson/General Idea.

In May 2024, Positive East hosted Rays of Resistance – an evening illuminating the radical and historic connection between the arts, LGBTQ+ sexual health and HIV/AIDS activism. The evening held at Shoreditch Town Hall included films, spoke word, dance, live music, DJs, poetry and photography.    

Saul is an artist and filmmaker working within creative non-fiction. His practice adopts highly collaborative approaches that scrutinise both the role of the filmmaker and the complex ethics involved in representing the stories of others. Based in London, Saul works as a director of photography, animator and editor within artists’ moving-image. 

Instagram: @saul_pankhurst 

Website: www.saulpankhurst.co.uk  

HIV Voices is a performance and spoken word project, supported by Positive East. At the heart of HIV Voices is the individual story and since officially launching at Positive East a decade ago, the collection has grown to encompass a wide array of different voices, revealing the story behind the statistics. 

Anna is a filmmaker and curator. She is currently a PhD student in Film at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom, after having completed her Masters in film curation at the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola in 2020. Her practice-based research combines her interests in the intersections of history and film, and the influence the moving image has on contemporary attitudes to coloniality. 

Instagram: @awrowraah  

Erin Aniker is an Illustrator whose bold and colourful people driven illustrations draw inspiration from her upbringing and love of her home city of London, dual Turkish and British heritage and the inclusive community she has grown up with in East London. She also draws inspiration from the colour palettes and patterns found in psychedelic and op-art of the 60s and 70s as well as the patterns in Islamic art and works of artists.  

Instagram: @erinaniker  

Website: www.erinaniker.com  

Ed Firth is the East London artist and writer behind the Pound Shop zine cycle and the ongoing Horny & High anthology comic series exploring British chemsex subculture among gay men in 2010’s London. 

Instagram: @thefurrealist 

Website: www.typ0.bigcartel.com