Mercredi 20 Avril 2016 14:32:54 par Annabelle Lafeuil dans Expositions

Medicine in Art is another exhibition in the series that confronts terms permeating the public sphere of reference with the viewpoint of the artist. Medicine is present throughout human life and impacts on all its aspects. Medicine offers help and cure, while putting us to task and inspiring reflection. The connotations it has are, above all, illness, pain and therapeutic treatment. Another theme is physical wasting and death. Illness goes handinhand with caregiving and compassion and this is the area of medicine that the patient and doctor share. Medicine is also a science, which in its vast scope comprises pharmaceutical, biological and psychological experimentation, dealing with the ethical issues that ensue. This scientific aspect also includes the psychology of illness understood as the relationship between the state of the mind and the state of the physical body.

© Meret Oppenheim, Sketch for X-Ray of M.O.’s Skull (Entwurf für X-Ray – Röntgenaufnahme des Schädels M.O.), 1978, photograph with handwritten notes by Meret Oppenheim, 34.5 × 27.5 cm, Collection T.A.L., Hamburg
 

Psychiatry is another fascinating medical area which enables us to look at how ‘being different’ can be a source of creativity and provide artistic therapy, where illness can indeed be extinguished through art. Another topical area of medicine, if one often looked down on, is plastic surgery, that enables individuals to live out their dream of being forever beautiful and young.

© Nikita Shalennyi, Where is your brother?, 2013, photograph, 150 × 200 cm, MOCAK Collection
 

Medicine is a source of many topics that in various ways torment the human psyche, thus an artistic field of engagement par excellence. Artists are finely tuned into ‘symbol providers’. And medicine is a versatile provider. Above all, it has an overview of what it means to be doomed to live in a mortal body.

The exhibition runs from April, 22th to October, 2nd 2016 in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow.