Sketch for Phytogyne Garden, a new installation by Juliana Cerqueira Leite and Zoë Claire Miller for Sick and Desiring, 2019
Sick and Desiring
Curatorial Contribution by Nora Heidorn Gardner's work is currently being exhibited in Bergen, Norway, as part of the Bergen Assembly 2019 project Actually, The Dead Are Not Dead.
The exhibition conceived by the core group and co-curators of Bergen Assembly 2019 takes place at five different locations and public spaces in Bergen. It is not structured according to thematic sections or curatorial authorship but rather along constellations that repeatedly rearrange the different strands of the content of Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Two curatorial contributions deviate from that system, each having its own title and space. The exhibition, which is conceived as a whole, thus results from the interplay of different individual and shared curatorial settings that cannot be traced back to individual authorship. This produces an innate rhythm of concentration and opening, intensification and ramification.
Sick and Desiring is an ongoing curatorial research project that asks, how can we politicise sickness and organise around shared vulnerabilities to live the body as a space for resistance? Curated by Nora Heidhorn, this exhibition is being held in Hordaland Kunstsenter 5 September - 10 November, 2019. The project encompasses an exhibition, workshops and screenings. Discursive, researchbased and activist practices reveal and subvert historical and ongoing patterns of medicalisation and pathologisation of gendered and racialised bodies. Together with its audiences, the project aims to consider and problematise the complex ways in which different modes of power are exerted to impact on health, sexual and social reproduction, and bodily autonomy and dignity. Sick and Desiring is set against our present culture which fetishises notions of health and wellness that are in the service of ever-increasing productivity. On the flipside of this lifestyle phenomenon is the decimation of infrastructures of care in contexts impacted by neoliberal policies and austerity measures. By drawing on activism, histories of radical healthcare and feminist group-work techniques, the contributors nurture practices of self- and collective care, reclaim medical and pharmaceutical knowledges that have become professionalised and monetised, undo the separation between human life and ecology, and demand agency and self-determination.
ARTISTS: Sarah Browne, Juliana Cerqueira Leite / Zoë Claire Miller, Feminist Health Care Research Group (Julia Bonn and Inga Zimprich), Joscelyn Gardner, Paula Pin / BioTransLab
Read more about the exhibition HERE.