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The ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art. In an era of diet pills, rising antidepressant usage, yoga, and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, affecting every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined Western scientific paradigms. Contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, drawing on the vexed experiences surrounding questions of health and identity. Health explores the ethical, aesthetic, and political significance of practices and theories connected to health and illness in contemporary art. Raw, confrontational, and affective, these texts consider pressing discourses in artistic practices including care, shifting identities and community building. The featured artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies and the maladies that seize them also reveal structural aspects of our how hegemonic narratives are connected with ideas of health, disability, and cure, and how sickness intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and class. By reclaiming other existences—beyond what is considered straight, healthy, neurotypical, or productive—this reader questions the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape people's perceptions of illness and normativity. Artists surveyed include Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Lorenza Böttner, The Canaries and Taraneh Fazeli, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Andrea Crespo, Patricia Domínguez, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Johanna Hedva, Rashid Johnson, Mahmoud Khaled, Carolyn Lazard, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Simone Leigh, Mujeres Creando, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques Las Pekinesas, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, Tabita Rezaire Writers include Aimar Arriola & Nanci Garín, Khairani Barokka, Clare Barlow, Dodie Bellamy, Rizvana Bradley, Anne Boyer, Eli Clare, John Foot, bell hooks, Ted Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Tarmar Guimarāes, Sunil Gupta & Simon Watney, Bhanu Kapil, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Peter Pál Pelbart, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Susan Sontag, R.D. Laing, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Robert McRuer, Naomi Pearce, Paul B. Preciado, Sud Rodney, James T. Hong, Mary Walling Blackburn, Danielle Wu Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London
- GenresArt
240 pages, Paperback
Published December 8, 2020
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October 19, 2025
I wish this book was less high-brow and discussed (and showed!) more artworks, so more people would feel compelled to read it and take something of value for themselves from it. The book offers so much, but only to a select company.
‘Healing, self-care and therapeutic practices have become productive spaces for artistic exchange and intersectional resistance, yet these are also coerced by the marketplace and cultural initiative that demand measurable health outcomes.’ (p. 12)
‘This book privileges and amplifies personal experiences that narrate how the vulnerability of our bodies and the melodies that seize them reveal structural aspects of our societies. The texts it features problematise the ideology of wellness that dictates our intimate and social acts, where a holistic ‘care for the self’ has become an elitist and coercive obligation to remain young and productive through the purchase of an endless chain of goods and practices . In this culture only sanitised active bodies are allowed to fully participate in society and obtain visibility through its media. The included contributors, instead, reclaim existence beyond ‘a state of health as a norm’ — beyond what is considered straight, healthy, neurotypical or productive — ultimately questioning the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape widespread normative perceptions. We can speak of a turn in health in contemporary art.’ (p. 13)
‘What emerges in this book is the prevailing blindspot within diversity agendas and cultural programs, where health intersectionality is still neither articulated not nurtured over the last decade. There has been a visible growth in placing gender and sexuality at the core of institutional programming. Similarly, museum collections are increasingly (albeit slowly) being interrogated and activated in order to address the colonial violence they often display. The forms of devastation associated with forced migration and climate emergency has been the subject of various recent major exhibitions and biennales. However institutions are still at the early stages of developing curatorial and educational practices tackling health marginalisation.’ (p. 14)
Tabitha Rezaire: ‘The wound is the land of healing’. The sense of alienation that may come with illness — the wound — and a space for nurturing care shifting identities and conviviality — the land of healing.‘ (p. 19)
Anne Boyer: ‘Fear educates our care for each other — we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person‘s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives for themselves only. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love.’ (p. 59)
Pedro Reyes, from ‘Nine Tenets of Sanatorium and Sanatorium Manifesto’ (2015): ‘Health is not the absence of disease. It’s a state in which we know that life is manageable and meaningful; it’s how we retain our ability to keep going when facing changes internally and externally.’ (…) ‘Medical environments have an aura that helps us believe that we as patients will be cured.’ (p. 82)
Naomi Pierce: ‘Health is abstract when pain isn’t everyday nuisance rather than total debilitation. It is always about managing and I don’t mean ‘just about managing’, I mean more a case of organising, like a to-do list: take painkillers, don’t sit still too long, exercise etc.’ (p. 117)
Johanna Hedva, from ‘Sick Woman Theory’ (2016): ‘The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminised and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other‘s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship and interdependent sociality, a politics of care.’ (p. 140)
Sarah Sharma: ‘Self-care is a strategy of survival, ‘an act of political warfare’ for body neglected and worn down by the intersecting nodes of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Self-care is distinct from the selfie-care found in glossy, neoliberal, post-feminist magazines, where women are instructed to recharge in order to re-enter currents of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. The self taking care of itself has become a photo op. (…) The radical potential of self-care is impeded by the need to document it, publicise it, enclose it in a list.’ (pp. 147-148)
Lauren Fournier: ‘To take care of the self is a neoliberal imperative that has been criticised for removing responsibility from the state, displacing the onus to the individual.’ (pp. 149-150)
Eli Clarke: ‘Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality falls on top of race… everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body means writing about this entire maze.’ (p. 156)
‘Enactments of ritual, song, herbs and cosmology are modes of potential healing (…) not located only in the body, but extends to the land, history and to the spirit.’ (p. 218)
‘Healing, self-care and therapeutic practices have become productive spaces for artistic exchange and intersectional resistance, yet these are also coerced by the marketplace and cultural initiative that demand measurable health outcomes.’ (p. 12)
‘This book privileges and amplifies personal experiences that narrate how the vulnerability of our bodies and the melodies that seize them reveal structural aspects of our societies. The texts it features problematise the ideology of wellness that dictates our intimate and social acts, where a holistic ‘care for the self’ has become an elitist and coercive obligation to remain young and productive through the purchase of an endless chain of goods and practices . In this culture only sanitised active bodies are allowed to fully participate in society and obtain visibility through its media. The included contributors, instead, reclaim existence beyond ‘a state of health as a norm’ — beyond what is considered straight, healthy, neurotypical or productive — ultimately questioning the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape widespread normative perceptions. We can speak of a turn in health in contemporary art.’ (p. 13)
‘What emerges in this book is the prevailing blindspot within diversity agendas and cultural programs, where health intersectionality is still neither articulated not nurtured over the last decade. There has been a visible growth in placing gender and sexuality at the core of institutional programming. Similarly, museum collections are increasingly (albeit slowly) being interrogated and activated in order to address the colonial violence they often display. The forms of devastation associated with forced migration and climate emergency has been the subject of various recent major exhibitions and biennales. However institutions are still at the early stages of developing curatorial and educational practices tackling health marginalisation.’ (p. 14)
Tabitha Rezaire: ‘The wound is the land of healing’. The sense of alienation that may come with illness — the wound — and a space for nurturing care shifting identities and conviviality — the land of healing.‘ (p. 19)
Anne Boyer: ‘Fear educates our care for each other — we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person‘s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives for themselves only. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love.’ (p. 59)
Pedro Reyes, from ‘Nine Tenets of Sanatorium and Sanatorium Manifesto’ (2015): ‘Health is not the absence of disease. It’s a state in which we know that life is manageable and meaningful; it’s how we retain our ability to keep going when facing changes internally and externally.’ (…) ‘Medical environments have an aura that helps us believe that we as patients will be cured.’ (p. 82)
Naomi Pierce: ‘Health is abstract when pain isn’t everyday nuisance rather than total debilitation. It is always about managing and I don’t mean ‘just about managing’, I mean more a case of organising, like a to-do list: take painkillers, don’t sit still too long, exercise etc.’ (p. 117)
Johanna Hedva, from ‘Sick Woman Theory’ (2016): ‘The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminised and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other‘s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship and interdependent sociality, a politics of care.’ (p. 140)
Sarah Sharma: ‘Self-care is a strategy of survival, ‘an act of political warfare’ for body neglected and worn down by the intersecting nodes of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Self-care is distinct from the selfie-care found in glossy, neoliberal, post-feminist magazines, where women are instructed to recharge in order to re-enter currents of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. The self taking care of itself has become a photo op. (…) The radical potential of self-care is impeded by the need to document it, publicise it, enclose it in a list.’ (pp. 147-148)
Lauren Fournier: ‘To take care of the self is a neoliberal imperative that has been criticised for removing responsibility from the state, displacing the onus to the individual.’ (pp. 149-150)
Eli Clarke: ‘Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality falls on top of race… everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body means writing about this entire maze.’ (p. 156)
‘Enactments of ritual, song, herbs and cosmology are modes of potential healing (…) not located only in the body, but extends to the land, history and to the spirit.’ (p. 218)
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