Health

The ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art.

In an era of diet pills, rising antidepressant usage, yoga, and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, affecting every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined Western scientific paradigms. Contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, drawing on the vexed experiences surrounding questions of health and identity. Health explores the ethical, aesthetic, and political significance of practices and theories connected to health and illness in contemporary art.

Raw, confrontational, and affective, these texts consider pressing discourses in artistic practices including care, shifting identities and community building. The featured artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies and the maladies that seize them also reveal structural aspects of our societies: how hegemonic narratives are connected with ideas of health, disability, and cure, and how sickness intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and class. By reclaiming other existences--beyond what is considered straight, healthy, neurotypical, or productive--this reader questions the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape people's perceptions of illness and normativity.

Artists surveyed include

Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Lorenza B ttner, The Canaries and Taraneh Fazeli, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Andrea Crespo, Patricia Dom nguez, Dora Garc a, Felix Gonz lez-Torres, Johanna Hedva, Rashid Johnson, Mahmoud Khaled, Carolyn Lazard, Guillermo G mez Pe a, Simone Leigh, Mujeres Creando, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques Las Pekinesas, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, Tabita Rezaire

Writers include

Aimar Arriola & Nanci Gar n, Khairani Barokka, Clare Barlow, Dodie Bellamy, Rizvana Bradley, Anne Boyer, Eli Clare, John Foot, bell hooks, Ted Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Tarmar Guimarāes, Sunil Gupta & Simon Watney, Bhanu Kapil, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Peter P l Pelbart, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Susan Sontag, R.D. Laing, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Robert McRuer, Naomi Pearce, Paul B. Preciado, Sud Rodney, James T. Hong, Mary Walling Blackburn, Danielle Wu

Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London

Author: Barbara Rodriguez Munoz
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 12/08/2020
Series: Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.3lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780262539463

About the Author
Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz is a writer and Curator of Temporary Exhibitions at Wellcome Collection, London. Her exhibitions include Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies (cocurated with George Vasey, 2019-20). She has written for Afterall, Concreta, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, and Mousse Publishing.