From May 10th to 18th, 2019.the artist, Fiona Davies, undertook a series of performative lectures within the exhibition Cast a Cold Eye on Life on Death: The Remake Medicalised Death in ICU. This is Davies’s examination exhibition, the culmination of four years of practice-led research into medicalised death in ICU. There are a series of installations, object-based works, performances and interactive works. In each performative lecture Davies led a small group of viewers through these works, involved them in activities and if they wanted to. encouraged them to participate in conversations about medicalised death.From May 10th to 18th, 2019.the artist, Fiona Davies, undertook a series of performative lectures within the exhibition Cast a Cold Eye on Life on Death: The Remake Medicalised Death in ICU. This is Davies’s examination exhibition, the culmination of four years of practice-led research into medicalised death in ICU. There are a series of installations, object-based works, performances and interactive works. In each performative lecture Davies led a small group of viewers through these works, involved them in activities and if they wanted to. encouraged them to participate in conversations about medicalised death.

This video is of the first stage in the lecture. It starts with an oral history given by an ICU nurses about one patient and her death. This oral history is quoted from ‘David Crippen, End-of-Life Communication in the ICU: A Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2008): 52.’ Then Davies sits behind the audience to tell a fairy tale while they watch the simulation on the medical monitor of a patient rupturing an abdominal aneurysm and bleeding out to death.

Warning: The exhibition and the performative lecture contain images, sounds and activities that deal with death, dying, hospitals, violence, blood and body parts for transplantation.

‘Cast a Cold eye on Life, on Death’ is a quote by WB Yeats