From the Sunday Morning Medicine wordpress site roundup of that weeks interesting takes on medical history comes a fantastic article by the staff writer on the Atlantic, Sarah Zhang about the Soviet attempts to eradicate the plague in the twentieth century.
It made me think of the amazing work by Amy Chan and Natalie Kit-Ying Cheung The Hong Kong Plague of 1894 and the slow reveal that takes place in that work exposing the medicalisation of the causes of the plague.
Read the article if you can. At least go there to check out the historic photos.
This is the first of three sites at the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi choosen for the site specific work Woven Architecture . Thinking more and more about the power structures of architecture and the ways this is carried over to the contemporary architectural response and of course how that is translated into hospital and ICU design.
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
This exhibition and program of performative lectures enter their last few days . Cast a Cold Eye on Life, on Death: The Remake – Medicalised Death in ICU finishes on Saturday 18th May at 4 p.m.
Until then the exhibition is open 11-5 and performative lectures are programmed for 1 pm on Thursday, 11 am and 2 pm on Friday the 17th with the last performative lecture of this series being on Saturday at 2 pm. This last lecture will be followed by a poetic performance given by Bhupen Thakker titled DEATH …( of fear). Then we’ll raise a glass to celebrate.
Cast a Cold Eye on Life, On Death: The Remake – Medicalised Death in ICU at SCA Galleries in Sydney College of the Arts, Kirkbride Way, Rozelle Sydney Australia
Just standing on your head waiting for the glue to dry that is sticking a button to your feet. Small figurines becoming playing tokens for a modified version of snakes and ladders that leads the players through a game outlining the stages of heart failure.
The game lies inside the wonder cabinet zinc box of Blood on Silk: Total Artificial heart (TAH). This work, the last in the series of five wonder cabinet works, provides another point of focus on the most elemental force behind the movement of blood and blood products: the beating of the heart. The heart is also one of the transplantable body parts and this junction between blood and body parts, the heart forms a focal point in this work.
