Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery


Worthy exhibition at the Wellcome Collection looking at the response of two contemporary artists to chronic illness.

The show looked at how illness disrupts how we think of our bodies but I found that because it just looked at two experiences it felt more like you were looking at the artists’ therapy than considering the issue in more general terms.

The photographer Jo Spence documented her breast cancer diagnosis. I did like her project “Beyond the Family Album” which looked at the things we miss out of photo albums as we usually only record the happy and successful moments in life. In hers she adds illness, divorce and tension.

Oreet Ashery offered an impenetrable series of videos looking at dying in the virtual world. Each one seemed to be over 30 minutes long and in the short time I gave one of them I really didn’t understand what I was looking at. I wasn’t sure how the tent structure and teddy bear bean bags fit in except that you needed some comfort to watch them in.

Closes on 26 January 2020

Review 
Guardian


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