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July 29, 2019 – Feature
“Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery”
Philomena Epps
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick,” wrote Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor (1978), “although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” This quote opens “Misbehaving Bodies” at the Wellcome Collection, which places Jo Spence’s healthcare work from the 1980s in conversation with Oreet Ashery’s 12-part web series “Revisiting Genesis” (2016). Through references to chronic and fatal illness, identity formation, medical discourse, and the politics of healthcare, the exhibition pays particular attention to how citizenship to the “kingdom of the sick” might productively disrupt and diversify common understandings of life and death, the body, and community.
Spence’s autobiographical artwork Beyond the Family Album (1979) takes the conventional form of the family photo album—photographs and press clippings are affixed to large sheets of paper, accompanied by captions and extended passages of text—but subverts the form by manifesting as a counter-archive of the self. By charting her divorce, her parents’ ill health, and her own struggles with chronic asthma, in addition to interrogating the invisibility …