В Лондоне открылась первая институциональная выставка художников, работающих с болезнями и инвалидностью

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Through August 16, 2026—The first thing you meet in “Flare-Up” is an oversized gastropod. Abi Palmer’s Chic Slug, 2024, revolves languidly on a disco-ball motor, a creature of ooze and glamour indifferent to the normative imperative to be upright, dry, and fast. It is a canny introduction to London’s first institutional exhibition of artists working from illness, disability, neurodivergence, and Deafness—a show that swaps piety for wit and sensuality. Goldsmiths CCA occupies a former Victorian bathhouse, and for this particular show curators Natasha Hoare and Marina Lemos smartly let the setting do half the work. Where water once flowed to cleanse the bodies of New Cross’s poor (hygiene as civic virtue, cleanliness as moral rank), art now circulates. Jesse Darling’s The Cleansing of the Temple (Luke 19:46), 2024, seizes the metaphor: an altarpiece of cheap bathroom tiles, deliberately soiled, collapsing scripture’s obsessions with purity into the ableist fantasy of the sanitized body. Avril Corroon’s newly commissioned Sublet Glory, 2026, returns water to the building in poisoned form, dripping dehumidifier runoff from mold-ridden rentals in Dublin and southeast London onto plush carpet, drop by drop. The exhibition proposes a lineage. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded curtain “Untitled” (Chemo), 1991, hangs as memorial and rite of passage, treatment brushing the skin briefly and beautifully. Nearby, Derek Jarman’s Act Up, 1992, joins Benoît Piéron’s Pillbox of Dungeness Seed Bombs, 2018, its medical container packed with seeds from Jarman’s home, Prospect Cottage: aids-era militancy carried forward as germinal matter, today’s crip artist casting himself as heir to a coalitional politics forged in the plague years. What distinguishes the younger generation is the conviction that access is a medium, not a service. Christine Sun Kim floods her work with captions until comprehension fails for everyone, hearing and Deaf alike: a mordant redistribution of interpretive labor. JJJJJerome Ellis composes with the stutter, letting disfluency restructure musical time, locating in its intervals a Black poetics of delay. RA Walden’s Crip Ecologies, 2026, makes the work’s title literal: organic matter sealed in glass jars, each specimen gathered within whatever range the artist’s body permitted on a given day, so the accumulating shelves become a calendar of fluctuating capacity. Racheal Crowther’s Qualified to Care, 2022, hijacks the apparatus of care itself: A double-sided LED pharmacy sign runs a video loop in place of its usual reassurances, asking who is deemed qualified to give care and who is eligible to receive it. Even the show’s infrastructure—some rest areas, quiet hours, creative captioning—reads less as compliance than as curatorial method, an inheritance from the late Lizzy Rose, whose access documents changed UK institutional practice. Rose, who passed away in 2022 after a long struggle with Crohn’s disease, haunts the show. Her video Sick, blue sea, 2018, desolate and deadpan at once, ventriloquizes a whale beached at Margate, England, its stomach full of plastic. Jamila Prowse’s film Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene, 2025, mourns Rose while reaching back to work by Bob Flanagan and Donald Rodney, who both made the sickbed a site of production in the 1980s and 1990s. Leah Clements’s new sound commission, Pure Joy, 2026, delivers the show’s most vertiginous passage: a first-person account of nearly dying, played beneath a water-filled canopy that scatters light, the flare granted its second meaning, not symptom but illumination, even ecstasy. The exhibition’s abundance is its one weakness: In these constricting tanks, the work of nineteen artists occasionally feels crowded. I do not come to this material neutrally: My own flare-ups arrive through the spine—brachyolmia, spinal stenosis, scoliosis—and the show’s account of time bent around a body’s bad days reads less like theory than chronicle. The timing sharpens everything: Outside these walls, Britain is relitigating disability benefits, long Covid has made chronic illness a mass condition, and pandemic-era access measures have been rolled back by the very institutions that are now programming crip content. Meanwhile, across the Thames, Tate Modern’s twin celebrations of Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo confirm the widespread preference for suffering embodied in a single iconic woman. “Flare-Up” argues the opposite: that pain is not personal but common, something held, translated, organized between bodies. It is a modest exhibition making a generational claim, and the claim holds.