The patient: biomedical art and curatorial care

In this Curatorial Practice-Based Research (CPBR) project, I argue that Biomedical Art calls for a very particular expansion of the idea of curatorial care, to encompass care for artists and their collaborators as human subjects, lively materials, audiences, archives and legacies. I undertake this through the experimental curating and reflective analysis of the large-scale touring exhibition The Patient: The Medical Subject in Contemporary Art. The thesis identifies an emerging field of practice in Biomedical Art, which focuses on the medical patient experience of biomedicine, and crosses scientific, therapeutic and social contexts. An exhibition engaging with living with illness, adapting to bodily change and contending with death, the artists included in The Patient undertake multiple roles; as patients, subjects, objectified bodies, living biological material, researchers, collaborators, and themselves, carers. I detail my creation of an interdisciplinary exhibition environment, where facets of the museum, the laboratory and the clinic coalesce to support these diverse perspectives, experiences and needs. My research project, which is undertaken primarily through a long-term engagement with, and commissioning of contemporary practitioners, is articulated as embodied and attentive curatorial methodology in which I mobilise ‘care’ longitudinally, situationally, materially, conceptually, receptively and emotionally. Through reflective curatorial practice I argue that these forms of care for artists, lively materials and exhibition visitors productively support the complexities and challenges of Biomedical Art represented in The Patient. I offer two main contributions to knowledge through this research: the articulation of Biomedical Art as an emerging contemporary practice; and a new way of understanding curatorial care as an imperative expansion from the caretaking of objects, to care for the living. I present curatorial care for Biomedical Art as intersecting with, and contingent upon, the structures and networks of institutional and community care of which we are all part