Tuesday 2 December 2008, 19.00–21.00

Artists Bobby Baker and Kira O'Reilly join psychiatrist Kamdaleep Bhui to reflect on how they have represented, engaged with and challenged the 'medical gaze' in their work. They will explore the ways in which detachment and empathy can be found both in artists' relationship with their subject and doctors with their patients. Do artists and doctors face similar dilemmas in patrolling the ethical dimensions of their work? 

Discussion chaired by Vanessa Desclaux, Assistant curator of Performance, Tate Modern (ADD) 

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£10 (£8 concessions), booking recommended

    

Bobby Baker

Diary Drawings

Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. Her company is called Daily Life Ltd and is based at Artsadmin, East London. She currently holds an AHRC Creative Fellowship in the English and Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London.   

'I'm a bit of a basket case really. Over the last 11 years I've experienced what's called 'severe and enduring mental illness', galloping arthritis in my knees and this last year breast cancer leading to surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I'll be talking about how the medical profession and I have gazed at each other, using some of my Dairy Drawings as illustrations. I’ve been doing these drawings since 1997 as a way of trying to keep track of the whole experience.  An exhibition of 200 of these drawings -selected from around 700, is due to open at the Wellcome Collection in March 2009.

Kamdaleep Bhui

Empathy and the Medical Gaze

Kamaldeep Bhui is professor of cultural psychiatry & epidemiology at Barts & The London School of Medicine & Dentistry and a consultant psychiatrist in East London. He was born in Kenya to a Punjabi Sikh family; he qualified in medicine in 1988 from Guy’s Hospital, and trained as a psychiatrist in South East London. His research, teaching and clinical work is with people with severe and enduring mental illness, depression and personality difficulties, with a special interest in social exclusion, inequalities, migration, racism and discrimination.

Young doctors tend to become less empathic during their training, partly to cope with the intense emotions they experience in response to death and feeling responsible and powerless against nature. Psychiatrists train as doctors in physical medicine and recommend treatments that range from medication, ECT, psychosurgery, legal detention and physical restraint, psychological techniques, and social interventions. Most psychiatrists accept they are grappling with uncertainties, dilemmas, impossible choices, powerful and primitive feelings, and fear of violence and conflict that emerge in the mind of the doctor/therapist and the patient. Discerning such feelings and inspecting them are crucial processes in order to reveal what the patient thinks but does not know, and what the patient is aware of but is unable to share or communicate.

Kira O’Reilly

Beside Myself

Kira O’Reilly is a UK based artist. Her practice stems from a fine art background; it employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider the body as material and site. Her current work is an interdisciplinary collaborative project at School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham where she is artist in residence. She is involved in laboratory-based activities of tissue culturing cells onto spider silk. These investigations of biomaterials and biocraft will generate a series of exchanges, materials and writings to form a book publication. This work is supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK and Europe, Australia and China and featured in the recently published in Sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society, Edited by Jens Hauser, Liverpool University Press, 2008. www.kiraoreilly.com/blog

In my art practice I’ve drawn on medical history and old medical procedures to investigate The Body and my body and the play of subjectivity between these two constructs. Through encounters with the viewer I’ve also asked who can do what to whom and where? Re-negotiating the relationship to the viewer, and recognising it as a dynamic exchange, has been central to generating works.

More recently I have extended these questions to the bioscientific and the biotechnical, appropriating biotechnical processes into the realm of art practice allows relations to occur, readings to be made and meanings to evolve that depart from classical Western notions of The Body and of life.