Friday 13th February – Saturday 25th April 2009
‘SimBodies & NoBodies’ is a presentation of new work by Turner Prize nominee Christine Borland at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast. In this exhibition the artist continues her exploration of medical practice, proposing new relationships with the systems and processes that shape our society and define our lives and deaths.
Christine Borland’s work has examined the relationship between medicine and performance, with a historical focus on the Anatomy Theatre and the Operating Theatre. She has recently explored a contemporary parallel to this relationship, observing medical students learning to communicate bad news through role-play with actor patients. For ‘SimBodies & NoBodies’, Borland has taken as her starting point the paradigm of learning by simulation in practical, clinical situations. In replica teaching wards and emergency rooms, a cast of simulated patient manikins can be programmed to recover if given the right treatment, or to die if their care is incorrect.
Through video work, sculpture and installation, using characters that include ‘Choking Charlie’, ‘Mr Hurthead’ and ‘Airway Larry’, Borland quietly draws the viewer into the world of the SimMan. ‘SimBodies & NoBodies’ reanimates these beings by introducing aesthetics and ambiguity to an arena dominated by function and objectivity. Crossing the imaginary line dividing the body from the self, the specimen from the individual, the doctor from the patient, this exhibition attempts to recuperate something of the essence of being human.
Christine Borland is an Alumni of the University of Ulster, Belfast and Glasgow School of Art where she is currently an Academic Researcher. She is in the final year of a NESTA Fellowship exploring the incorporation of Humanities into the medical curriculum in both Glasgow University and the Peninsula Medical School in Cornwall.
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