What does sick mean? What does healthy mean? What does normal mean? And who decides how to prove normality? These questions open the very useful catalog in plain language that the Museion, in Bolzano, has attached to the “Kingdom of the Ill” exhibition, on view until 5th March. The title comes from the one of a book by photographer Susan Sontag: «There are two Countries in the world», it is said at the opening of the essay, «the healthy people Country and the sick people Country. We cannot decide which country to live in. We end up in one of the two countries and we cannot choose». The exhibition – curated by Sara Cluggish and Pavel S. Pys – investigates the fractal between healthy and sick, a free zone that can become a territory for care. In that intermediate semantic area, there are the paradigms on which the works by the twenty exhibited artists are based on: health, disease, care, infection, technology and pollution.
Kingdom of the Ill, exhibition view, Museion, Bolzano, 2022. Ph. Luca Guadagnini, courtesy Museion
In that territory questions become urgent: how can sick people feel good, what needs to change in the world? How do we behave with the sick, elderly, addicted to drugs, mourning people? The exhibition is an argumentative text that denies Sontag’s thesis to transform it into a hypothesis of a society based on well-being, in the meaning of “feeling well”. Feeling good despite an illness, such as by adopting a holistic approach, as today illness also deals with doctors’ salaries, treatment costs, the health system, overwork, relationships conditioned by the cultural perception of an illness. In a post-pandemic scenario, the exhibition is based on the lived experiences of male and female artists, who in some cases identify themselves as chronically ill or with disability.
Sara Cluggish and Pavel S. Pyś, Diogo Passarinho Studio, Enrico Boccioletti, Brothers Sick (Ezra e Noah Benus), Shu Lea Cheang, Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Phillip Andrew Lewis, Julia Frank, Sharona Franklin, Barbara Gamper, Nan Goldin e Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), Johanna Hedva, Ingrid Hora, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ian Law, Carolyn Lazard, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Juliana Cerqueira Leite & Zoë Claire Miller, Mary Maggic, Mattia Marzorati, Erin M. Riley, P. Staff and Lauryn Youden, courtesy Museion
They worked for five years reflecting on the emotional and health dimensions of the disease, on cultural and viral contamination, on the failures of the state and private welfare systems. Enrico Boccioletti, Brothers Sick (Ezra and Noah Benus), Shu Lea Cheang, Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Phillip Andrew Lewis, Julia Frank, Sharona Franklin, Barbara Gamper, Nan Goldin, Johanna Hedva, Ingrid Hora, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ian Law, Carolyn Lazard, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Juliana Cerqueira Leite & Zoë Claire Miller, Mary Maggic, Mattia Marzorati, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), Erin M. Riley, P. Staff and Lauryn Youden: their works demonstrate how the society should take care of people, how there should be an inclusive society that was also oriented to the aftermath, to the future that follows a death or a treatment, a drug addiction or a recovery.
Kingdom of the Ill, exhibition view, Museion, Bolzano, 2022. Ph. Luca Guadagnini, courtesy Museion
Powerful in this direction is the work by Nan Goldin. The Museion exhibits the extraordinary work from 1986, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, her first slideshow, which loops 690 of her photographs taken between 1979 and 1986. An intimate and sentimental diary in the post-Stonewall riots gay subculture and in the No wave environments in downtown New York. At Museion another work by American photographer is also exhibited, which is similar in the narrative structure: “Memory Lost”, that reflects on a recent period in Goldin’s life, characterized by her addiction to opioids. Intimate and private snapshots and archival images are assembled in a single question on the meaning of memory during the experience of drug addiction.
Kingdom of the Ill, exhibition view, Museion, Bolzano, 2022. Ph. Luca Guadagnini, courtesy Museion
The work by Staff is suggestive as well, it seems to revisit the Arte Povera tensions in a green key: “Acid Rain for Museion” is about the corrosion, the infection and the porosity of the body. A network of suspended metal pipes that regularly cause a mixture of acids to drip into steel barrels to demonstrate a slow and inexorable deterioration process that corrodes skin and monuments.
Info:
various artists, Kingdom of the Ill
curated by Sara Cluggish and Pavel S. Pys
1/10/2022 – 5/03/2023
Museion
Piazza Piero Siena 1, 39100 Bolzano
museion.it
He is an art critic and professor of Contemporary Art History at IUSVE. He also teaches Critical Image Reading at the Palladio Institute of Design in Verona and Contemporary Art at the Master of Publishing at the University of Verona. He has curated several contemporary art exhibitions in unconventional places. He is the artistic director of the Grenze Photography Festival. He is a theater critic for national magazines and newspapers. He organizes research and experimentation theatrical events. Among the recent publications Frame – Videoarte e dintorni for the University Library, Lo Sguardo della Gallina for Lazy Dog Editions and for Mimemsis Smagliature in 2018 and 2021 for the same publishing house, Theater and photography.
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