LONDON.- From 12 to 16 June 2025, Tate Modern’s visitors will have a rare opportunity to see the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt. Begun around 1989, this vast work consists of 42 quilts and 23 individual panels which represent 384 individuals affected by HIV and AIDS. It will be laid out in a grid across the floor of the Turbine Hall, echoing how it has previously been shown outdoors to raise awareness of the ongoing AIDS pandemic.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is one chapter of the largest community art project in the world. It began in the USA in 1985, when American activist Cleve Jones started inviting people to create textile panels to commemorate the friends, family and loved ones they lost to AIDS. These individual panels were sewn together to create larger quilts, which were then shown outdoors as a form of protest to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS. The displays often included a reading of all the names on the panels.

In the late 1980s, Scottish activist Alistair Hulme visited San Francisco, where he witnessed an early display of the quilt. When Hulme returned home to Edinburgh, he began coordinating the creation and display of a UK version, as many others did around the world. One of its largest public displays was the ‘Quilts of Love’ display in June 1994 at Hyde Park Corner, London, showing selected panels from the US and the UK, alongside sections created by fashion designers.

Seven UK HIV support charities formed the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership in 2014 to conserve and display the quilt. Today it stands as an important reminder of those who were lost, and of the fact that HIV and AIDS continue to affect people and communities today. While antiretrovirals have made it possible to live with HIV, access to this medication still varies dramatically across the globe.

Siobhán Lanigan from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership said “The purpose of our partnership is to have the Quilt seen as often as possible in as many places as possible. The display in the Turbine Hall will be the largest showing of the UK Quilt in its history and it will reach the biggest audience it has ever known. With every viewing, the names and the lives of all the people commemorated and all those who could not be named, are recognised, celebrated and brought out of the shadow of the stigma that is still associated with an HIV diagnosis today. Everything we can do to break down that stigma is of great value. This is one big step in that direction that can be built upon in future displays.”

Karin Hindsbo, Director of Tate Modern, said “It’s going to be an honour to show the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt in the Turbine Hall. This feels like an apt place for the public to see it. Tate Modern is all about exploring connections between the global and the local – in this case, connections between an international activist network and a local creative community, as well as connections between a global pandemic and the individual lives it has affected. The quilt is an incredible feat of creative human expression and I know our visitors are going to find it a deeply moving experience.”

Throughout the course of the display, volunteers from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership will be working alongside Tate’s staff to welcome visitors and provide further information and support. On Saturday 14 June, there will be live readings of the names at 11.00 and 14.00.