The brilliant English sound artist, composer, and video artist Stuart Marshall (1949-1993) was one of the first media artists to take on AIDS as a central subject matter. Marshall was a co-founder of London Video Arts, and part of a generation of video artists who made work for broadcast or community television as well as for gallery and festival screenings: at the time, BBC Channel 4 frequently featured challenging work by independent artists, and in North America, community-access cable offered broadcast opportunities for artists. After his death from AIDS-related complications in 1993, Marshall’s video Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983) was thought to be lost. Although it was produced for SAW Gallery’s 1983 International Festival of Video Art, and both London Video Arts (now LUX) and Vtape distributed Marshall’s work, this title was not on our shelves and was nowhere to be seen for decades. In 2024, however, PhD researcher Conal McStravick located a copy at SAW Gallery in Ottawa. SAW loaned the tape to Conal, who brought it to Vtape, where Kim Tomczak and Dustin Lawrence worked on recovering and digitizing it. McStravick believes that Kaposi’s Sarcoma may be the first AIDS activist video ever produced, and we are proud to say that it is once again available for public presentation, educational use, etc., through both Vtape and LUX Distribution (UK).

Part of Vtape’s mission is to preserve and make accessible historical video and audio works like this one. You can read more about this video here.

Image credit: Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983), by Stuart Marshall