Transplant is a large-scale photographic sound installation that explores the experiences of transplant patients and the extraordinary issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure. Showing this month at the Nunnery Gallery from Friday 4th September, it creates an immersive environment, weaving subtly revealing portraits and striking photographs of the hospital with intensely personal narratives, often recorded at the bedside, and sounds derived from the patients’ surroundings.
Photographer Tim Wainwright and sound artist John Wynne were artists-in-residence together for one year at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants. Working closely together, they photographed and recorded patients, the devices they’re attached to or have implanted in them, and the hospital itself. In this ambitious new work, Wainwright and Wynne investigate the boundaries between documentation and abstraction and search for new relationships between sound and image.
“Through all these differences and similarities of sound and vision, seeing and hearing, looking and listening, a rapprochement emerges in the collaboration. The insistent stillness of a photograph hovers in and out of the temporal movement of spoken language, but both add a powerful sense of human presence and individuality to each other,” said David Toop.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a book edited by Victoria Hume, manager of rb&h Arts, an independent charity within Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust which made this project possible. Also entitled Transplant, the book contains perspectives on the artists’ work and on the wider issues raised by the project from a range of contributors including writer David Toop, critic Charles Darwent, medical researcher/writer Lesley Sharp, anthropologist Tom Rice, psychologist Claire Hallas and patient Kate Dalziel. The book also contains an exclusive interview with Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, an interview with Tim and John by Angus Carlyle and a DVD by the artists.
The show runs until 28th September and is open Thursday - Sunday 1pm until 6pm. The Nunnery is at 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ. Nearest tube is Bow Road on the Dirstict Line.
2 comments:
I went to see this exhibition last week. What an interesting idea, well executed! There are probably about 20 large photographs, mostly portraits of people looking straight at the camera. The range of emotions on their faces was startling: from resignation, to fear, to bravado... The sounds come from behind the canvasses and are a mix of ambient ward sounds and commentaries from patients. It's the best kind of immersive exhibition -- evocative without overdoing it.
What I like about this sort of exhibition, which is tucked away and open at oddish hours, is that it clearly aims at giving the participants a voice and its main value is in the making of the art. Those of us visiting and viewing are lucky interlopers on the process.
Exactly what I prefer in relation to this kind of exposure, that's saved along with start at oddish hrs, is that it definitely is aimed at providing the particular individuals the speech and main benefit is within the particular generating with the skill. Those people of people viewing along with watching are generally blessed interlopers about the method.
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