Dis-ease: Art, Illness, and Abstraction

This session will consider the complex engagements between art, illness, and abstraction.

Visual culture has been a catalytic force in the anxieties and obsessions elicited by novel illnesses, from the emergence of HIV to the rapid spread of Covid-19 and the ever-mounting threat of environmental toxicity. However, across both popular and medical discourses, narratives of disease have often been communicated via the repetition of harmful figurative tropes. We therefore wish to draw attention to how artmaking might challenge this representational impasse and the categorical distinctions it reproduces. 

Hamad Butt and Helen Chadwick, both of whom were subject to major exhibitions in 2025, responded to the AIDS crisis through a refusal of representational or didactic approaches. Instead, both artists pursued strategies of abstraction to provoke an embodied sense of dis-ease in their viewer. Drawing attention to the inherent volatility of corporeal boundaries, these artworks encourage a more complex relation to illness than that advanced through biomedical categorisation alone.  

Thinking with such examples, this session will explore the following: How have artists channelled the affects and somatic responses associated with contamination through abstraction? How can art account for the racialised, gendered, and classed coordinates of disease without recourse to figuration? What limitations or tensions might the presentation of disease through abstraction present? 

We invite papers that focus on modern and contemporary art and encourage contributions that adopt a critical perspective on these provocations. The session will take the form of a short introduction, followed by four 20-minute papers and an audience discussion.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Elliot Gibbons, University College London, Elliot.gibbons.21@ucl.ac.uk

Zaena Sheehan, University College London, zaena.sheehan.20@ucl.ac.uk