Health (Documents of Contemporary Art)

This anthology explores the ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art.

In an era of diet pills, record antidepressant usage, yoga and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, dictating every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty and the productive body that have defined the western scientific paradigms; contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, incorporating personal and singular approaches to vexed experiences surrounding questions of health and identity.

Raw, confrontational and affective, the writings in Health engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies and the maladies that seize them also reveal structural aspects of our societies, particularly how sickness intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender and class. This reader questions the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape people’s perceptions of illness and normativity.

Artists surveyed include Oreet Ashery, Lorenza Böttner, The Canaries and Taraneh Fazeli, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Mahmoud Khaled, Carolyn Lazard, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Simone Leigh, Mujeres Creando, Park McArthur, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Pedro Reyes, Tabita Rezaire.

Writers include Khairani Barokka, Dodie Bellamy, Rizvana Bradley, bell hooks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Susan Sontag, R.D. Laing, Paul B. Preciado.