Artists who are currently experiencing or have experienced the trauma of cancer and the possibilities of recovery. They have experienced confrontation, reckoning, coming to terms, starvation, therapy, holistic alternatives, and all that helps them to move on and live their daily lives.
The focus of the exhibition is on ongoing questions that lead to pathways of answers, from harmful habits and inherited patterns, to big realisations, ending with the experience and expansion of self-love.
Communication can be a good weapon, which is why Sára Kölcsey-Gyurkó, the exhibition’s creator, felt it was so important to show and share with the world her experience of this different condition that she has been living with every day since November 2022, when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.
Breast cancer affects one in eight to nine women in her lifetime, causing around 2,000 deaths in Hungary every year. Unfortunately, statistics show that the disease has become increasingly common among people under 40.
The colour of the battle against breast cancer is pink, but for a breast cancer patient, the reality is far from that. The vast majority of patients are traumatised by treatment, surgery and the fear of death, yet facing it all is inevitable. The artists shown here have turned to the tools of art for help, to help them process and heal.
The aim of the exhibition is to break down the taboos of social communication about cancer, the fear of silence, the inappropriate things to talk about: walls.
That is why we thought it important to address artists who have already experienced these dilemmas and tensions, so that they can come out into the open, so that they dare to talk about it, so that they dare to share their experiences, so that they can be asked about it, so that there can be a discussion with the doctors and diagnosticians who treat them. The disease should not be taboo and silenced.
What are the alternative options for cancer patients, based on their own stock, for example from the molecular diagnostics side.What holistic treatment options can they have? What are the alternatives? How can we take control of our own lives?
The publicity of the topic has also been reinforced by, on the one hand, Asia Dér’s 2023 film about Gábor Einspach, an intimate and compassionate portrait of Einspach, who is battling pancreatic cancer, and, on the other hand, an earlier exhibition, Outwitting Cancer: Making Sense of Nature Enigma, the first UK exhibition on cancer research, held at the Francis Crick Institute in London in September 2021.
The topicality of the subject is also demonstrated by the successful project C80 – The Aesthetics of Cancer, organised by Semmelweis Medical University, which debuted earlier this year, aimed at breaking down the communication taboos surrounding cancer, with the participation of pathologists, curators, artists, oncologists, patients and medical professionals, and which resulted in several research workshops, conferences, exhibitions and publications.