The exhibition offers insights into the states, gestures and institutions of illness, health, vulnerability, healing and care. The works, however, do not regard the spheres of sickness and health as two separate spaces, but as parts of a spectrum on which we constantly move back and forth throughout our lives depending on our physical and mental well-being, our mobility and mixed ability to perform.
While for people living with chronic illnesses distinctive life rhythms are a fundamental experience, for a person who thinks of themself as a ‘healthy being’, the condition of sickness dislocates them from their usual linear temporal regime and their routines. Meanwhile, the slowness of malaise and the shrinking of the space for action contradict the ideas of efficiency and incessant activity. At the same time, market economy does not leave the fragile spaces of illness and the end of life untouched: we never cease to exist as consumers in the marketplaces offering real and virtual solutions, services and remedies.
Although the individual’s physical condition is one of our most intimate experiences, it is just seemingly a personal issue, concern and responsibility; the exhibition understands both illness and the process of recovery as something embedded in the social framework. The works on view also reflect on the inequalities present in health care systems, and highlight strategies and practices that provide an opportunity for the reclaiming of our agency and for the enhancement of self-determination.
As the title of the exhibition, borrowed from Johanna Hedva’s 2016 essay Sick Woman Theory suggests, the works highlight forms of coping that can be applied in the physically and mentally vulnerable state of illness. Hedva imagines a world in which interdependence is the norm, in which health is a collective matter, in which vulnerability is celebrated.
When will the time for a revolution of bedridden and exhausted bodies come; a world in which ‘the sick rule the world’, instead of constantly adapting our possibilities to the expectations and contours of the world around us?