A collegial research space for artists living with chronic illness to share embodied practices, situated knowledge, artistic methodologies, and speculative presents.
During a two-week residency, Ar Utke Ács and Martin Bas will open a research space exploring chronic illness as an embodied site of artistic production.
They will pursue the fluctuating and multifaceted aspects of the term body. Both artists present a body of work in which the body resonates with various forms and concepts of bodies ('social body'/'corps social, corps politique’).
Living with inflammatory bowel disorder (Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis), they independently developed practices investigating the body as a political, social and imaginative territory. This common ground allows to explore how the ‘body’ intertwines, merges and collapses with these broader interpretations of what a body is, encompasses, and physically holds. The research considers the chronically ill body as a producer of situated knowledge, both in relation to the medical lens and to self-explored and community-led knowledge. Experiences of fatigue, uncertainty, pain, adaptation, dependency and care serve as starting points for artistic enquiry.
This space is intended for individuals whose bodies and minds are affected by the limitations of chronic illness, potential accomplices, and other art/cultural workers living or involved with chronic conditions. We will seek to expand the dominant narratives of disability by exploring perspectives from the disabled and queer communities that view bodily differences as vehicles of invention, resistance, intimacy and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. It is intended to expand the boundaries of how the disabled, the crippled and the constrained organism are perceived, within these constraints, but also in the other worlds they are building, whose nonnormative rules appear to foster proud, alternative postures through “positive self-sabotage, selfexploration and self-eroticism”.
Through the encounters and means facilitated by the FOCUS ON – residency (conversations, reading, movement practices, writing, informal gatherings), the fluctuating group will test how chronic illness shapes perception, temporality, attention and forms of relation, and how it transforms notions of productivity, presence, participation and collective life.
We aim with this temporary community to generate artistic tools, vocabularies and forms of solidarity emerging from our lived experiences of chronic illness.
For this residency, Ar and Martin invite practitioners living with experience of chronic illness in the Copenhagen scene to join them for their first physical meet-up.
