Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contemporary Art
Artists
Curator Ingrid Bachmann
Bec Dean
Guy Ben-Ary
John A Douglas
3 June –
6 August Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose
2016 Brenton Heath-Kerr
Carol Jerrems
Eugenie Lee
David McDiarmid
ORLAN
Helen Pynor
Jo Spence
John Wynne & Tim Wainwright
The Patient: Encountering the Medical Subject
The word patient has a dual meaning. It describes his collaborators Nathan Thompson,
a state of being – of bearing a situation quietly, Andrew Fitch, Darren Moore, Douglas Bakkum,
without complaint. It also describes a person Stuart Hodgetts and Mike Edel have created an
in a hospital or clinical context, who is ill and autonomous, cybernetic synthesiser controlled
undergoing diagnosis or treatment. The word by a living neural cluster made from Ben-Ary’s
originates from the Latin, patiens, which means own stemcells in cellF.
“suffering, enduring”.¹ And for the medical patient, it
For The Patient, I have researched a wide range
is a common enough experience to wait, with pain.
of contemporary art to engage with the various
This exhibition, The Patient, addresses the lineages and progenitors of biomedical art:
embodied experience of the artist as medical the feminist artists that challenged the social
patient, and the medical patient as living subject obligation to hide the diseased or surgical body
in contemporary art. It explores the ways in which from public view; the HIV and AIDS activist
artists engage with powerful human experiences artists whose works broughthome to mainstream
in the fields of health, biological science and Australia the power and subversive potential of
medicine, contributing to discourse on the art in addressing discrimination, visibility and
representation of illness, disease, care, individual the social impacts of the epidemic; socially-
agency and what it is to be human. engaged photographers who addressed directly
and defiantly the loss of agency that patients
From over two decades of artistic enquiry through
experience within the hospital system; and
“Bio Art” ² convergences of the humanities and
body-based performance and conceptual
sciences, artists now have extraordinary access
artists and their collaborators whose use of their
to the spaces of biological science and medicine
own bodies as object, subject and art material
– from laboratories, surgeries, therapeutic and
brought the medical body viscerally into the
community contexts, to specialist museums.
space of the gallery.³
Their access is not restricted to spaces, but
includes relationships with scientific and ORLAN has given access to both her early and
medical professionals and their fields of recent video works for this project including
research and knowledge. performative surgeries and animations of
augmented bodies. The exhibition also includes
There are four new works in The Patient.
recent artworks made by artists John Wynne &
Helen Pynor’s The end is a distant memory
Tim Wainwright, and Ingrid Bachmann, who have
considers the state between living and dying and
worked through different processes in close
the scientific, medical and digestive consumption
consultation with transplant patient communities
of other animals. Video and performance artist
and hospitals. As this is an exhibition engaging
John A Douglas exhibits a trilogy of works
with the experience of illness including those of
traversing his lived experience as a renal patient.
terminal patients, many of the artists represented
This includes the premiere of a new work as
have passed away. Permission to show these
a transplant recipient called Circles of Fire.
works has been gained from the estates of
Installation artist and painter Eugenie Lee has
Jo Spence, David McDiarmid and Carol Jerrems,
created a participatory, virtual reality installation
the friends of Brenton Heath-Kerr and the partner
called Seeing is Believing that enables visitors
and collaborator of Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose.
to comprehend the experience of chronic pain.
Looking to the future of patienthood and the The history of medicine as a subject matter
potential of the human body, Guy Ben- Ary and of art is perhaps as old as art itself, leaving
Bec Dean, Curator
behind its evidence in Stone A ge amulets, Bec Dean is a curator and writer with a
idols, mosaics, hieroglyphics and illuminated background as a visual artist working in video,
manuscripts, through to the Western canon and photography and performance. Her curatorial
the celebrated anatomical drawings of Da Vinci, interests are focused on the reciprocity
the consumptive muses of the Pre-Raphaelites, between distinct disciplines across science
the etchings of Hogarth, the suffering figures and the humanities and the representation
of Munch, and the self-portraits of Kahlo. of new media and experimental practice
The material record of human history tells us within the wider discourses and contexts
that people across all times, places, cultures of contemporary art.
and religions have grappled with expressing
She has been working for contemporary
the transient and fragile nature of our fleshly,
arts spaces and organisations since 1996.
embodied human experience. 4
1 maquariedictionary.com
2 The field of “Bio Art” is defined by one of its most prolific writers
and artists, Eduardo Kac, as “a new direction in contemporary art
that manipulates the processes of life.” Kac, E. Signs of Life: Bio
Art and Beyond (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007), 18.
3 Art historian Amelia Jones has written extensively on the work of
body-based performance artists. In Body Art she writes of ORLAN,
Flanagan and Rose that they, “turn the body inside out, enacting
the stubborn corporeality of the self while refusing any conception
of this corporeality as fixed in its materiality.” Jones, A. Body Art:
Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 226.
4 The Wellcome Collection in London, UK, holds the most diverse
collection of medical objects, artefacts, books and materials relating
to the medical humanities and the social history of medicine. Its
publication The Art of Medicine tells the story of medicine through
art and artefacts. Anderson, J., Barnes, E., Shackleton, E. The Art
of Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Public Program
Personal/Social Objects
Maria Makismova & Renee Quiambao Bec Dean would like to thank presenting partner
As part of the Personal/Social Objects UNSW Galleries and its staff for supporting
project visitors are invited to bring a small and presenting this project. The Patient is also
empty medication container to be displayed supported by Museums & Galleries of NSW,
in a pill box cabinet. the Australia Council for the Arts and the
Russell Mills Foundation. Many thanks to
UNSW Galleries
the event partners, National Art School and
FREE
Performance Space. This project has also
been supported by 133 individual funders
through Pozible and the generosity of artists
Deborah Kelly, Raquel Ormella, Lily Hibberd,
Nadège Desgenétez, Eugenie Lee and
Lucas Ihlein & Ian Milliss.
John A Douglas, Circles of Fire: Version 1, 2016. Carol Jerrems, photograph from the Royal Hobart Hospital
Synchronised dual channel 4k to HD. Series, 1979. Printed by Roger Scott, 2004.
video and sound. Gelatin silver photograph.
Courtesy of the artist and Chalkhorse Courtesy of Ken Jerrems and the Estate of Lance Jerrems
Sydney. with thanks to the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
Artists
Sheree Rose
b. 1941, Los Angeles, USA. Brenton Heath-Kerr was a Carol Jerrems’ black and white,
Lives and works in Los Angeles. performance artist and AIDS autobiographical portraits and
activist, until his death at the photographs of young people
From 1981 until his death in age of 33 from an AIDS-related and subcultures of the 1970s
1996, Sheree Rose collaborated illness. Heath-Kerr made in Australia resonated with
with her partner, Bob Flanagan, costumes and performances the rapid social change and
in a series of photographs, for the gay and lesbian club spirit of resistance of the times.
videos and performances scene in Sydney and was later In the Royal Hobart Hospital
that documented their sado- presented in contemporary Series, Jerrems continued to
masochistic relationship as art contexts including the take photographs of herself,
well as the impact of his cystic National Gallery of Australia. her changing body, her clinical
fibrosis on both their artistic Heath-Kerr’s work explored surroundings, other patients
and personal lives. identity and experience – and the doctors and nurses
Visiting Hours is arguably including his experience as a treating her during a lengthy,
the pair’s most famous work. patient – through costume and twelve-week stay for treatment
This major collaboration characters that obfuscated his of Bud-Chiari Syndrome in
premiered in 1993 at the own features. Many of his iconic Hobart Hospital. Jerrems
Santa Monica Museum, costumes have been collected died the following year from
California, before touring by the Museum of Applied Arts her illness.
in the United States. and Sciences, Sydney.
Photograph from the Royal Hobart
Homosapien, 1994. Hospital Series, 1979.
Wall of Pain, 1993/2016. Printed by Roger Scott, 2004.
Type C photograph.
Documentary photographs. Gelatin silver photographs.
from Visiting Hours, 1993-1995. Photograph by John Webber. Exhibited with excerpts from
Photograph by Sheree Rose. Carol Jerrems’ hospital diary, The Patient.
Courtesy of Sheree Rose and Courtesy of Ken Jerrems and the Estate
the One Archives, Los Angeles. of Lance Jerrems with thanks to the Heide
Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
Eugenie Lee David McDiarmid ORLAN
b. 1974, South Korea. b. 1952, Hobart, Australia. b. 1947, Saint-Étienne, France.
Lives and works in Sydney. d. 1995, Sydney. Lives and works in Los Angeles,
New York and Paris.
Project Support
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