How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

Accompanying program

Support structures event series

Hangover Reading Club #11 - Figures of care | Reading group session led by curators Flóra Gadó and Judit Szalipszki (in Hungarian) | 17.09.2022 (Sat) 11.30 / Trafó Gallery

Guided tour (in Hungarian) | 23.09.2022 (Fri) / Trafó Gallery

Mary Maggic: Open Source Estrogen – a lecture performance on hormonal histories and fictions | 01.10.2022 (Sat) / Trafóclub

Hangover Reading Club #12 - Long-covid and the Medical Industrial Complex | Reading group session led by Rowena Harris (UK) | 08.10.2022 (Sat) 11.30 / Online

Guided tour (in Hungarian) | 14.10.2022 (Fri) / Trafó Gallery

Barbora Kleinhamplová: Sickness Report | lecture performance | 14.10.2022 (Fri) / Trafó Gallery

Feminist Health Care Research Group: Being in Crisis Together – Workshop led by artist and curator Inga Zimprich (DE) | TBA / Trafó Gallery

Opening: 2022/09/02 19:00
On view:  2022/09/03 - 2022/10/16

Exhibition remarks by Eszter Ureczky Ph.D. , senior lecturer

Exhibiting artists: Oreet Ashery, Ágnes Eperjesi, Feminist Health Care Research Group (Julia Bonn/Inga Zimprich), Adelita Husni-Bey, Mary Maggic, OMARA Mara Oláh, Dominika Trapp

Curator: Judit Szalipszki

The handout of the exhibition can be downloaded from here.

The exhibition offers insights into the states, gestures and institutions of illness, health, vulnerability, healing and care. The works, however, do not regard the spheres of sickness and health as two separate spaces, but as parts of a spectrum on which we constantly move back and forth throughout our lives depending on our physical and mental wellbeing, our mobility and mixed ability to perform.

While for people living with chronic illnesses distinctive life rhythms are a fundamental experience, for a person who thinks of themself as a ‘healthy being’, the condition of sickness dislocates them from their usual linear temporal regime and their routines. Meanwhile, the slowness of malaise and the shrinking of the space for action contradict the ideas of efficiency and incessant activity. At the same time, market economy does not leave the fragile spaces of illness and the end of life untouched: we never cease to exist as consumers in the marketplaces offering real and virtual solutions, services and remedies.

Although the individual's physical condition is one of our most intimate experiences, it is just seemingly a personal issue, concern and responsibility; the exhibition understands both illness and the process of recovery as something embedded in the social framework. The works on view also reflect on the inequalities present in health care systems, and highlight strategies and practices that provide an opportunity for the reclaiming of our agency and for the enhancement of self-determination.

As the title of the exhibition, borrowed from Johanna Hedva's 2016 essay Sick Woman Theory suggests, the works highlight forms of coping that can be applied in the physically and mentally vulnerable state of illness. Hedva imagines a world in which interdependence is the norm, in which health is a collective matter, in which vulnerability is celebrated.

When will the time for a revolution of bedridden and exhausted bodies come; a world in which ‘the sick rule the world’, instead of constantly adapting our possibilities to the expectations and contours of the world around us?

The exhibition can be visited free of charge.


Supported by: National Cultural Fund of Hungary, DIOTEX-Bio Kft., Káli Kövek



Image cover: Ágnes Eperjesi: Rolled-up gesture 4, 2022, chromogenic photogram (detail)
TRAFÓ KORTÁRS MŰVÉSZETEK HÁZA
ticket office:
  • Main hall performance days: 5 pm - 10 pm
  • studio and club performance days: 5 pm - 8:30 pm
  • other days: 5pm - 8 pm
Trafó Gallery opening hours:
  • Performance days: 4-10pm.
  • Opening hours: Tuesday - Sunday: 4pm-7pm.
  • Closed on Mondays.

  • The Trafó Kortárs Művészetek Háza Nonprofit Kft. works in the maintance of Budapest Főváros Önkormányzata.

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