A newly digitized open-access version of Allan Klusaček and Ken Morrison's 1992 edited collection, A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art and Contemporary Cultures, has been rereleased alongside World AIDS Day / Day With(out) Art to celebrate the book's 30th anniversary. The book originally came out of the cultural interventions at the 1989 Montreal International AIDS Conference and significantly contributed to the literature about cultural resistance and HIV/AIDS activism within Canada.

The digitization of this long out-of-print book was coordinated by A/CA member Ryan Conrad in collaboration with Artetexte and is being released with an accompanying article by Conrad that featuring interview excerpts with Klusaček and Morrison.

Click here for Conrad's article. 

Click here to access the A Leap in the Dark ebook.

About Ryan Conrad:
Ryan Conrad is Adjunct Research Faculty at the Feminist Institute for Social Transformation at Carleton University and previously held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with Archive/Counter-Archive from 2019-2022. He is currently working on his manuscript entitled Radical VIHsion: Canadian AIDS Film & Video. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Concordia University and an MFA from Maine College of Art. He is an active film and video maker.

About Artetexte:
Artexte is a library, research centre and exhibition space for contemporary art. Our unique print and digital document collection holds over 30 000 documents covering the visual arts from 1965 to the present, with an emphasis on the art of Canada and Québec. Over 80% of the acquisitions stem from donations from the visual arts community.