This programme explores the relationship between body and healthcare systems. What is the impact of communication on the ‘healthifying’ process and in the context of health care? When do body-related decisions need to be rationalised? The programme illuminates how power plays out between the roles of patient and physician in the contexts of both conventional and alternative medicine. These relationships of body and care maneuver between science and magic, hope and specific terminologies and languages, empathy and available resources.

 Leah Clements work title, To Not Follow Under, comes from an interview between two psychiatrists, R. D. Laing and Antony Clare, who talk about relationships with patients in distress and how doctors need to keep the line between providing help and maintaining distance. This work explores not only forms of communication but also forms of worry and compromise. Rebecca Lennon’s video work, Words Are Angular Sharp Tenant, playfully uses visual and verbal language to examine narratives of body and disorder. Eitan Efrat and Daniel Mann’s film, The Magic Mountain, talks about the mountain and forms of unconventional medicine in the context of natural resource use and how the impact of such medicine can be both positive and negative.

 Curated by Milda Januševičiūtė

 

Rebecca Lennon
Words Are Angular Sharp Tenant, 4’, 2018

Rebecca Lennon layers images, speech, text and sound to meditate on questions of selfhood, language, disorder and choreography. Sewing together diaristic footage, with gestures and body language, hums and verbal tics, associations and repeated, spiraling phrases, these works reject linearity to explore instead fragmentary, rhythmical, circular and bodily narratives. In Words Are Angular Sharp Tenant images, sounds and words are treated with equal attention. These materials are combined, reworked and repeated; meaning and connotation slip and destabilise. The artist creates a situation in which languages (visual and verbal) can be set into play with one another.

An artist based in London, Rebecca Lennon works across media including video, text, performance, sound and music to think about and play with the non-linear shapes and rhythms of the voice, memory and the speaking body. She has exhibited internationally, across contemporary art and experimental music platforms, radio and, recently, publishing. 

Leah Clements
To Not Follow Under, 18’, 2019

 To Not Follow Under considers the limits of empathy and the point at which a person has to prioritise their own wellbeing in order to continue to care for someone. Through the voices of three people in positions of care or supervision (a sleep neurologist; a psychotherapist; and a deep sea rescue diver), the film explores where the cut-off point might be before someone may be pushed ‘over the edge’ or ‘under’ into physical or emotional distress and darkness.

Leah Clements is an artist based in London whose practice spans film, performance, writing, installation and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between the psychological, emotional and physical, often through personal accounts of unusual experiences that are difficult to articulate. Her work also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in both critical and practical ways.

Daniel Mann and Eitan Efrat
The Magic Mountain, 68’, 2020

 If landscapes are traditionally understood as two-dimensional representations and as backdrops for grand anthropogenic histories, The Magic Mountain dwells on the material substrate that makes up the territory and on the sometimes invisible and undetectable vibrant energies that actively participate in the doing and undoing of history. Underground, where darkness prevails, the body becomes a sensor that absorbs the environment directly into the blood and lungs. Underground, the conventional classification of five discrete senses, while intuitively appealing in that they relate to distinct organs and locations in the body, seems to be heading towards oblivion. No one sense operates independently of the others; instead, the body becomes a muscular-skeletal, organic and neurological whole. The Magic Mountain questions whether we can imagine a landscape that operates directly on the body by either healing or killing.

 Eitan Efrat lives and works in Brussels. Efrat’s practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image; the spatial and durational potentialities of reading moving and still images and the material surfaces of image production.

 Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. His work explores the production and distribution of images in the context of colonial violence and environmental degradation. 

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