BARCELONA.- The Suñol Foundation in Barcelona opened MORTALES+ on 3 December 2025, a powerful exhibition that brings together art, collective research, and lived experience to reflect on four decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The project, created by artist Albert Potrony with the collaboration of curator and educator Roser Sanjuan, marks an expansion of the earlier MORTALES initiative, deepening its focus on illness, care, and the emotional and social landscapes shaped by HIV.

Over the past year, Potrony and Sanjuan worked closely with a group made up of people living with HIV, researchers, activists, and healthcare professionals. Their voices and stories form the backbone of the exhibition. Access to the Suñol Soler Collection allowed the group to engage directly with artworks that span decades, creating a dialogue between personal testimony and contemporary art.

The exhibition unfolds in several thematic sections. It opens with an exploration of pleasure and sexual freedom in the early 1980s—an era abruptly interrupted by the arrival of AIDS. Inspired by Chema Cobo’s Sweet swimmers, 3 selfwatchers, the group created four hanging sculptures titled Banners of Pleasure, accompanied by a sound piece woven from participants’ reflections. This space transitions into Susana Solano’s La Parella no. 1, a work that captures the silence, distance, and fear that followed the outbreak of the epidemic.

A second section confronts the notion of stigma, using works by Miquel Navarro and Alberto García-Alix to consider how bodies once associated with liberation became sites of suspicion and control. Nearby, a moving installation of twelve printed fabrics bearing the physical traces of participants’ bodies engages in dialogue with Darío Villalba’s 1974 work Amor Krankenhaus o Duren I–II, turning memory, vulnerability, and resilience into tangible form.

The exhibition culminates with Mortals+ (2025), a video that gathers testimonies, poetry, and reflections on life at the margins, alongside Zush/Evru’s Untitled (1970). Together, they underscore the exhibition’s central message: that art can offer space for healing, connection, and renewed imagination.

MORTALES+ is also a tribute to the late Josep Suñol Soler, whose foundations continue to support initiatives linking art and science. Today, advances in treatment have transformed HIV into a manageable condition, but the emotional and social challenges remain. This exhibition invites visitors to slow down, listen, and rethink how communities remember, resist, and care for one another.