Body and Mind EntanglementsImagining Health II Thematic Interviews

26 October 2023

Photo: HFBK

Written by Kate Docking and David Peace
 
Introduction
 
The first Imagining Health exhibition in 2022 showcased interpretations of how post-war medical utopias might be imagined artistically. It raised pertinent societal questions about the ethical and political purposes of medicine, what medicine can do to the body, how the body is changed by medicine, and our understanding of bodily limitations. In light of continually evolving medical technologies, these questions are perhaps more relevant than ever. The 2023 Imagining Health II exhibition again applies transdisciplinary perspectives from art and history to further illuminate the complex relationship between medical, scientific, and political developments and an individual’s health and wellbeing. These pieces interpret the meanings of medicine and health from different thematic angles, exploring harm, treatment, recovery, growth, and enhancement, and the overlapping nature of these states. Music, performance, sculptural practice, digital screens, films, sound, and objects are used to explore how medical imaginaries – often reflecting environmental, political, economic, social, and cultural factors – have influenced the ways in which both individual and societal health has been managed, experienced, and marketed in different geographical contexts across the globe.
 
Dr Kate Docking and Dr David Peace, historians at the University of Hamburg, have interviewed the Imagining Health II artists to discuss the background and content of their work. Our conversations have elucidated how commercialisation, technology, social discrimination, extremist ideologies, and war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have influenced the lived experiences of medicine and health portrayed in the Imagining Health II exhibition. In the interviews about the exhibited pieces, all of which highlight the interconnectedness of the body and the mind, three overarching themes emerged: Performance Society, Health Technologies, and Wounded Body and Mind.
 
Performance Society
 
Pieces related to the theme of Performance Society explore how the drive for self-optimisation can negatively influence both physical and mental health. The video installation produced by Christiane Mudra entitled ‘Selfie & Ich’, comprises a film about the experiences of people living with mental illness filmed in several Berlin apartments. The stories are contextualised in the film with digitised excerpts from the file of a patient who experienced over forty years of psychiatric treatment in the Nazi era and subsequent decades. Mudra critically reflects upon the concealment of mental health problems stemming from the societal pressure to perform in both our private and professional lives. She aims to highlight how ‘toxic positivity’ – the belief that people should always uphold a positive mentality – on social media can negatively impact the self-perception of young girls. Through the video and the accounts of its protagonists, Mudra challenges viewers to question the stigmatisation of mentally ill people.
 
The two exhibition pieces developed by Jori Kehn and Benjamin Janzen, entitled ‘Fight flight fawn freeze’ and ‘Ambivalent Symbiont’, also address the Performance Society theme from a utopian perspective. Kehn constructed EEG and EKC devices herself for ‘Fight flight fawn freeze’, which she installed in the exhibition space and used to track and amplify her nervous system’s biological signals. The piece ‘Ambivalent Symbiont’, created collaboratively by the artists, displays inflated balloons resembling internal organs made out of inflated silicone bodies produced from casts of wood. Both pieces critically engage with the concept of assistive technologies. While ‘soft robotics’ holds promise for minimally invasive surgery, the artists encourage reflection on the dystopian cases of robotic exoskeletons enhancing human performance. The piece developed by Leo Elia, ‘All Super Bowl Ad Slogans Since the End of History, Series, ongoing’explores the use of medication as a form of human enhancement. Understanding commercial television advertisements as cultural artefacts, Leo Elia displays spray-painted signs with slogans to critique the shift from advertisements for painkillers to anti- (illegal) drugs messages aired on television during the Super Bowl in the United States, with the aim of ‘making art tangible’. By displaying a sign associated with selling Advil (Ibuprofen), Leo Elia links the promotion of pain medicine by pharmaceutical companies to capitalistic ideology associated with productivity, inspired by the 2004 Advil slogan: ‘Faster Stronger Better’. The problematisation of self-optimisation in digital media is also present in ‘Traces of a blurry vision’, an installation by Flora Fee Mayrhofer, which showcases a contact lens attached to interconnected tripod ring lights to explore the relationship between social media and physical and mental health. Mayrhofer’s piece highlights the pressure for self-optimisation on social media (ring lights are commonly used by online influencers), with the contact lens indicating that although one can be focussed and sharp, online images are often filtered to the brain as an overwhelming blurred mass of impressions.
 
‘Listening to my Heart’ by Kyle Egret, which explores the entanglement between art and music, further engages with the theme of societal demands placed on the body. The exhibited video, which depicts the process of Egret listening to his heart and drawing to its beat, encourages spectators to be more in tune with their bodies in spite of capitalistic pressures. Egret’s belief that ‘you are the set tempo’ is reflected in the message that the body can be experienced on its own terms without the need for health gamification (for example, smart watches), which can lead to a sense of inner calm. The notion of the performance society is also implicitly challenged in the piece entitled ‘Pledges to life: Terrestrial Vaults’ by Juan Ricaurte-Riveros from an environmental and local perspective. Believing that ‘nature belongs to the people’, Ricaurte-Riveros uses a display of seeds from Colombia surrounded by balloons, which represent skin-like vases to reflect the heritage of people from the Global South in the face of the increasing monocropping of transnational sterile seeds sewn for profit. Ricaurte-Riveros’s piece represents hope and the promise of life in the face of the detrimental impacts of wars and agricultural practices on societies.  
 
Health Technologies
 
The proliferation of health technologies in recent years, which have made it easier than ever to monitor health, have further driven the drive for self-optimisation. Exhibition pieces engaging with the Health Technologies theme critically consider the relationship between technology and how we (and others) treat our bodies. The pieces by Janzen and Kehn encourage spectators to reflect on the value of using medical technologies beyond their original purposes, with their problematisation of the use of ‘soft robotics’ in medicine and appropriation of diagnostic tools for sound production. The digital installations by Lea van Hall entitled ‘Health Bar (Green)’ and ‘Health Bar (Hearts)’ showcases a linear green health bar and a red cardiac health bar made out of ceramics in a generic video game style, and questions whether health tools such as fitness trackers – technologies that, she argues, ‘we’re not really in control over’ – oversimplify the complexities of health in our attempts to optimise our lives. This lack of control is implicitly indicated in the placement of the screens fixed high up on the wall of the exhibition space, towering above the spectator. Van Hall’s work, which draws on childish aesthetics, highlights that there is often not a distinction between digital and non-digital spaces in the realm of healthcare. The piece by Matthis Frickhoeffer and Sebastian Kommer, ‘Re-Framing Electric Dreams’, reflects on how design can influence the space that the body inhabits. The installation is a recreation of a capsule structure, Kishō Kurokawa‘s Nagakin Tower (1972), a cultural landmark of Tokyo and symbol of the metabolism architecture movement founded in the late 1950s, which aimed to use architecture as a tool for societal change. The tower was demolished in 2023. The piece by Frickhoeffer and Kommer explores questions of private space, solitude, necessities, and modular structures, reconsidering issues of metabolism by attempting to explore a personal relationship with a building that no longer exists and was not visited by the artists. The pulsating and responsive light of the capsule imitates a heartbeat and resembles the object’s own life and the collective value it has acquired through cultural memory, suggesting that a technologically-enhanced living space might itself become part of the body.
 
The Wounded Body and Mind
 
Pieces that engaged with the Wounded Body and Mind theme explored mind and bodily trauma, and their interrelationships. Faun Vium has produced an installation inspired by her sister’s psychosis, entitled ‘Queen Annabel: Rehearsal’, resulting from a collaboration between her and her sister. The installation recreates the scene from when Vium’s sister was hospitalised; when she experienced Vium’s artwork as real. The incorporation of the original chairs from the doctor’s office together with a sculpture of Queen Annabel, a character Vium created as part of her film work, reflects Vium’s desire to capture both the real and perceived aspects of the scene. Vium’s piece challenges ideas about care, sisterhood, and how we deal with mental illness both in art and within the family. The piece was therapeutic and multi-layered, illuminating both the overwhelming feeling of witnessing the suffering of a loved one and when the surreal is experienced as real.
 
The wounded body is portrayed in Andrea Laušević’s piece, ‘Untitled’: a plain white-coated stretched canvas adorned with tightly hand-stitched cuts resembling wounds. Laušević’s work, depicting messy, imperfect stitches, reflects the non-linear nature of wound healing. With its mosaic of different cuts which bulge on the canvas – some grotesque, others more approachable – Laušević explores the tension between the perception of wounds as visually unappealing and their potential to be aesthetically attractive. Laušević’s piece also reflects the entanglement between mind and bodily trauma and healing, sparking conversations about traumatic experiences transcending the skin and the unpredictability of the mental process of healing due to lack of knowledge about scar formation. The interconnection between bodily and mental trauma is also evident in Kehn’s performance, which, by visualising the tracking of the nervous system, raises broader conversations about the impact of mental trauma on the rhythms of one’s heart-rate and frequency of breath.
 
Conclusion
 
The themes Performance Society, Health Technologies, and the Wounded Body and Mind have sparked dynamic conversations about the complex and evolving role of health and medicine in modern societies. Together we have explored what it means to be ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’, and how interpretations of these concepts have developed over time, as well as in different political and cultural contexts. The common nature of particular health experiences has also come to the fore in the form of the lived entanglement between emotional trauma and physical wounds, the pressure to perform in fast-paced and competitive societies detrimentally affecting mental health, and the importance of one’s living, political and cultural environment in furthering or diminishing physical and mental wellbeing. These themes have been brought to life by the artists, who drew upon historical experiences and events to produce insightful interpretations of how medicine and health might be imagined in the context of societal and environmental current – and future – changes. Together, the pieces reflect the importance of ensuring that both the practices of medicine and the pursuit of improving health are conducted ethically and in a socially equitable manner with consideration for the impact on the environment and local communities.