“Curating Modernism & Medicine” is a public conference prompted by the exhibition Lifeblood – Edvard Munch. Here, 'curating' is understood both as the organisation of exhibitions and as the care and interpretation of objects within curatorial practice and art-historical research.
Scholarship has tended to privilege anatomical representation as the primary, if not the sole, site for historical intersections of art and medicine. At the same time, art histories of modernism have struggled to account for medicalized bodies, even though art has been made, used, viewed, and collected by modern subjects such as Edvard Munch whose embodied experiences have been mediated by modern medical epistemologies, technologies, institutions, and therapies. Like Lifeblood, “Curating Modernism & Medicine” aims to explore modern artistic practices as profoundly entangled with medical modernity, and to prompt more interdisciplinary, more intermedial, and more caring research.
Program:
8:30: Coffee & registration
9:00: Welcome: Øystein Sjåstad (UiO), Gustav Jørgen Pedersen (MUNCH) & Tone Hansen, Director of MUNCH
9:15–9:45: Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch in the Aula: Bodies of Knowledge”
9:45–11:30: PANEL 1: Modern Medicalized Artists and Audiences
- Alison Syme, “Vanessa Bell, Dr Marie Moralt, and Matters of Care”
- Aaron Richmond, “Doctors of L’Esprit nouveau: Energy, Psychology and the Modern Aesthetic Subject (1920–1925)”
- Hannah Darvin, “In Living Sculpticolor: Medical Circles and Petrolagar’s The Doctor (after Sir Luke Fildes)”
- Tanya Sheehan and Lauren Applebaum, “Curating Art of Integration: Jacob Lawrence’s Hospital Series”
11:30–11:45: Break
11:45–12:30: Allison Morehead, “Curating Lifeblood: Edvard Munch”
12:30–14:00: Lunch Break
14:00–15:45: PANEL 2: Therapeutics and Collecting
- Hedvig Mårdh, “Strindberg speaks through her”– artist and collector, patient and doctor”
- Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso, “Illustrating Hysteria: Female Representations in Fin-de-Siècle Hispanic Transatlantic Magazines”
- Chiara Sartor, “(De-)Pathologizing Asylum Writings: On “Graphomaniacs,” Indiscreet Doctors, and Anti-Psychiatric Collectors in the History of Art Brut”
- Suzanne Hudson, “‘Troubled Waters,’ or Margaret Naumburg as Curator”
15:45–16:15: Coffee Break
16:15–17:45: PANEL 3: Curating Gender and Disability Today
- Camilla Mørk Røstvik, “The Painters Are In: Rethinking Menstrual Imagery in Contemporary Art”
- Amanda Cachia, “Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism”
- Kristen Nassif and M. Jordan Love, “Tension, Empathy, and Disability: Connecting Artists and Physicians in the Art Museum”
18:00: END
Abstracts can be downloaded here and biographies can be downloaded here.
The conference is organized by Allison Morehead (Queen’s University, Canada), Tanya Sheehan (Colby College, USA), and Gustav Jørgen Pedersen (MUNCH, Norway) in collaboration with Øystein Sjåstad (University of Oslo) and Richard Dahlberg Andresen (University of Oslo, administration) and the Research Group for International and Nordic Modernism at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo (UiO).
The conference is supported by MUNCH, The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, the University of Oslo, The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, Colby College, Queen’s University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
