%0 Journal Article
%T Misbehaving Bodies: exhibiting illness
%A George Vasey
%D 2021
%V Special issue: Curating medicine
%N Autumn 2020
%K cancer care
%K chronic illness
%K Curating illness
%K exhibiting lived experience
%K Healthcare
%K Jo Spence
%K medical photography
%K moving image
%K Oreet Ashery
%K representation
%K sickness
%X The essay explores the process of curating Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, an exhibition held at Wellcome Collection from May 2019 until January 2020. The exhibition brought together two artists of different generations who explored the representation of illness and care narratives from the perspectives of patient and lived experience. The project was co-curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz and George Vasey. The Wellcome Collection challenges how people think and feel about health and this essay explores how the exhibition built upon those ambitions. The text addresses how the content of the exhibition was supported by the various exhibition elements: narrative, process, architecture and design, interpretation and live programming.
How we die is how we live, only more so
(Ashery, 2016)
%Z The World Health Organization defines healthy as the ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Much rests on the word ‘complete’ and while many people would define themselves as sick, I’m not sure how many people would define themselves as 100 per cent healthy.
%Z “When will things get back to normal?” has been a frequently heard question throughout Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, I’ve seen a growing antagonism to the phrase on social media https://www.notgoingbacktonormal.com
%Z Initiated by Sasha Saben Callaghan and Harry Josephine Giles, https://www.notgoingbacktonormal.com (accessed 25 May 2020)
%Z The examples include: ‘Take Care’, ‘La Ferme Du Buisson’, France, 2019.
%Z Further examples include The Crip Research Group (Leah Clements, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose), who have set up a series of screenings, workshops and talks at ICA, Wysing Art Centre and BALTIC that aim to ‘crip the institution’.
%Z I’m thinking here of Read My Lips at Auto Italia, London; the film 120 BPM exploring the Parisian arm of ACT UP in the late 80s, and The History Keeps Me Awake at Night, a retro of David Wojnarowicz held at the Whitney, New York (all from 2018).
%Z Please see Ryan, F, 2019, Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People (Verso), which offers a harrowing exploration of the effects of austerity and the erosion of Disability Living Allowance in the UK. Other examples include McRuer, R, 2018, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU Press), which takes an international perspec-tive. The documentary Crip Camp (2020), directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham, explores the civil rights history of disability in America.
%Z I have previously written on Spence’s work and the influence of the educational photographer Keith Kennedy and his pioneering work on a psychiatric ward at Henderson Hospital in the early 70s for Burlington Contemporary Journal: http://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/journal/journal/keith-kennedys-group-photography-and-the-therapeutic-gaze-of-jo-spence-and-rosy-martin (accessed 18 May 2020)
%Z A good account of the complexity of the archive can be found in Heath, C, 2017, ‘In Search of “Red”, Remodelling the Jo Spence Memorial Archive’, Photography & Culture, Volume 10, Issue 3, November, p 289
%Z I archived much of the work that existed in the UK on behalf of Richard Saltoun Gallery and Terry Dennett who had run the Jo Spence Memorial Archive. I was assistant curator on Jo Spence, Work (Part I & II) at Studio Voltaire and SPACE, 2012, and curated the exhibition Jo Spence & Alexis Hunter at Richard Saltoun Gallery, 2013.
%Z In this particular case the exhibition involved close collaboration with project manager Bryony Harris and live programme curator Persilia Caton.
%Z Feminist photography collective based in East London with a fluid membership active from 1975 until 1978. Associated members included An Dekker, Sally Greenhill, Gerda Jager, Liz Heron, Michael Ann Mullen, Maggie Murray, Christine Roche, Jo Spence and Julia Vellacott. The group also collaborated with Helen Grace, Maggie Millman, Jini Rawlings, Ruth Barrenbaum, Annette Soloman, Arlene Strasberg and Chris Treweek.
%Z It was rare for Spence to work in isolation and much of her work was made in collaboration and co-authored with people such as Rosy Martin. Spence worked with Dennett over many projects up until her death in 1992, with Dennett becoming the executer of the estate.
%Z There is a very good analysis of Jo Spence’s work in Ribalta, J and Dennett, T, 2005, Jo Spence: Beyond the Perfect Image. Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), published to coincide with a major retrospective of her work held at MACBA, Barcelona curated by Jorge Ribalta. Spence, Jo, 1995, Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression (Routledge) brings together most of Spence’s published writing.
%Z A good account of the phototherapy and its histories can be found in Loewenthal, Ed (ed), 2013, Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in the Digital Age (Routledge).
%Z I’m referencing the title of Spence’s 1986 publication Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography (Camden Press).
%Z The panel included Joe Scotland, Director at Studio Voltaire, Emily Wiles, Producer and Malavika Anderson, Head of Live Programme at Wellcome Collection and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Exhibitions Curator at Wellcome Collection.
%Z Running order: Episode 1: The Slideshow, The Phone Call; Episode 2: DuckDuckGo, Friendship; Episode 10: Dora, Amy, Genesis; Episode 11: Falling Apart
%Z Running order: Episode 3: Cushions, Digital Will & Foot; Episode 5: Archives, Avatars; Episode 8: Bambi, Death Online
%Z Running order: Episode 4: M&S Cake Factory, Swindon; Episode 6: Charles Keene College, Leicester; Episode 7: Slideshow, Mushroom, Shower
%Z A good account of Martin O’Brien’s work can be found in O’Brien, M and MacDiarmid, M, 2018, Survival of the Sickest, The Art of Martin O’Brien (Live Art Development Agency).
%Z I cannot remember who came up with this description, but it was often repeated in design meetings.
%Z Spence was heavily influenced by Soviet documentary film-making and particularly the work of Dziga Vertov who would often use collage to undermine the sense of a singular factual account of a subject.
%Z ’m taking my thinking here from Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, Thames & Hudson, London, 2018, particularly pages 29–30, Relational Studies: Exhibition-As-Polylogue, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of a ‘polylogue’ exhibition that imagines the ‘cultural field as a place of multiple occupancy’ (Griselda Pollock).
%Z This negative comment is fairly typical from critical audiences: ‘Have you considered whether it is responsible for an organisation with the reputation of Wellcome to display an exhibition in which a woman who has clearly had breast surgery for cancer claims to have survived without orthodox treatment? Women can and do die through belief in coffee enemas and massage. It is irresponsible to perpetuate these myths.’
%Z Crip theory has emerged in disability discourses to reclaim the derogatory term ‘cripple’. Cripping draws on queer methodologies and proposes a positivist narrative to resist able-bodied heteronormativity. The following books have been influential to my thinking during the research for Misbehaving Bodies and give a good introduction to the field: McRuer, R, 2006, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs and Queerness and Disability (New York University Press) and Kafer, A, 2013, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press).

%Z Highlights of the public programme include Beyond the Perfect Image, a day of talks, performances and workshops celebrating ageing. A collaboration with St Christopher’s Hospice resulting in workshops and discussions exploring end of life care. There were numerous talks and discussions on grief, care, and dying in the digital era, with speakers including Helena Reckitt, Elaine Kasket, T J Demos, Rosy Martin, Johanna Hedva and Imani Robinson.

%Z This anonymous quote is from a roundtable discussion hosted at Maggie’s with people undergoing cancer treatment and their families that was published in the Misbehaving Bodies guidebook. The participants were not named to protect their anonymity.
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/misbehaving-bodies/
%J Science Museum Group Journal