SESSION: 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 viewers. 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?
Session Convenors:
Elliot Gibbons, University College London
Zaena Sheehan, University College London
Speakers:
Ryan Mangione-Smith, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Some Other Binaries: Herve Guibert and the Representation of AIDS Death
This paper argues that Herve Guibert’s relatively forgotten autobiographical film Modesty, or Immodesty (1992), offers a means for historicizing and conceptually surpassing certain deadlocks that have long plagued AIDS cultural theory regarding figuration and abstraction. This paper begins with two central assertions: first, AIDS cultural theory has historically granted significant critical weight to strict interpretive binaries (figuration/abstraction; realism/formalism; militant/decadent; rageful/elegiac; individual/collective; victim/martyr); second, this overreliance on binarisms has problematically naturalized many of AIDS cultural theory’s interpretive methods, obscuring their historical and spatial entanglements with a broader set of pre-AIDS discourses on the politics of representation and authorship. Through the work of Guibert, whose (mostly literary) engagements with AIDS have long troubled neat distinctions between political critique and individual decadence, this paper argues that Modesty, or Immodesty’s excess of figuration exceeds the boundaries of documentary realism, ironically abstracting death through an overload of its literal representation. This paper suggests, in other words, that one cannot properly understand Guibert’s idiosyncratic representation of “AIDS death” via AIDS cultural theory’s prevailing binaristic aesthetic frameworks. Visually analyzing Guibert’s film alongside contemporaneous representations of “AIDS death” in the works of Derek Jarman and David Wojnarowicz, this paper poses a novel historical account of AIDS cultural theory’s development in two ways: first, by illuminating said theory’s indebtedness to a specific set of post-Warholian/Foucauldian concepts of representation, and second, by sketching an alternative conception of AIDS cinema as belonging to a longer, underacknowledged history of filmic representations of death which blur distinctions between figuration and abstraction.
Catherine Spencer, University of St Andrews
Indexical Abstraction and the Ethics of Containment in the work of Veroncia Ryan
Objects drawn from medical and healthcare contexts, and their material and conceptual implications, have long been significant aspects of Veronica Ryan’s practice. Pillows and cushions for cervical, spinal and breathing conditions abound, alongside metal surgical receptacles, and stainless-steel shelving units used in myriad settings, including hospitals. These sources attained prominence in works created through a 2017 residency at the Art House, research for which included a visit to one of the last remaining padded cells in Britain at the Wakefield Mental Health Museum. They have subsequently informed major statements such as the floor-based installation Infection in Ryan’s 2021 exhibition. Along a Spectrum, presented during the Covid-19 pandemic, which developed an established interest in the phenomena of containment in relation to the psycho-social ramifications of quarantine and care ethics.
While Ryan has reflected that she does not think of her sculptures and textile works as abstract, their fabrication often involves processes of abstracting and extraction; ‘residues, traces, memory, deposits’ are key terms and ‘triggers for thoughts’. This paper situates Ryan’s work within a wider phenomenon I term ‘indexical abstraction’, in which the trace mark inexorably leads back to the labouring body and the effects of gender, racialisation, class and disability. The indexical abstraction of works like Infection complicates physical and psychological borders, countering their divisive effects, while recognising the psychic role of containment as a protective measure. As such, indexical abstraction has significant ramifications for understanding the relationship between embodiment and mental health, and constructions of illness, disability and dis-ease.
Ola Wlusek, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art/Florida State University
Beading the Genome: Illness, Abstraction, and Indigenous Resilience in Erica Lord’s The Codes We Carry
This paper examines Erica Lord’s (Iñupiaq/Athabascan) ongoing series, The Codes We Carry: Beadwork as DNA Data, focusing on her sculptural works, including Covid-19 (Greyscale) Tuppie, RNA Microarray Analysis, version 2, and Smallpox Burden Belt, DNA/RNA Microarray Analysis. Lord’s practice combines traditional Athabascan beadwork techniques with microarray genetic data—visual abstractions of diseases that have disproportionately impacted Indigenous populations, from historical epidemics like smallpox to the ongoing effects of COVID-19. Rather than resorting to figurative or didactic imagery, Lord encodes illness through abstraction, translating pixelated biomedical data into tactile, culturally resonant forms such as sled dog blankets (tuppies) and baby belts. These wearable forms carry profound connotations of protection, kinship, and community resilience, asserting Indigenous agency in the face of long-standing colonial medical violence. This paper argues that Lord’s work challenges the representational impasse surrounding illness by transforming scientific data into embodied, material language. Through abstraction, Lord not only critiques the historical and ongoing erasure of Native bodies within biomedical discourse but also reclaims the epistemological space of genetic science. Her beadwork literalizes the “codes we carry,” rendering visible the racialized and gendered dimensions of disease while resisting reductive portrayals of Indigenous suffering. In doing so, Lord opens up a mode of witnessing illness that is both affective and decolonial, prompting a reconsideration of how disease might be visualized—and understood—beyond clinical or symbolic frameworks.
Luigi Crea, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History/University of Bern
The Tactile Abstraction of Illness: José Leonilson and the Embodied Aesthetics of AIDS
Scholars of José Leonilson (1957-1993), a Brazilian artist born in Fortaleza and trained in São Paulo, have often emphasized the autobiographical and figurative nature of his work. Yet beyond these intimate narratives lies a significant body of abstract works in which illness, vulnerability, and mortality are expressed through materials, textures, and absence rather than direct representation.
Following his HIV diagnosis in 1991, Leonilson’s practice became increasingly minimal and introspective. His textile works, often made with white voile, started employing emptiness and silence as expressive tools. Sparse words or stitched forms on these translucent surfaces convey both fragility and resistance, translating emotion into tactile form.
A paradigmatic case is O Perigoso (1991), where the artist uses his HIV-positive blood to create a small stain beneath the inscription “O Perigoso” (“The Dangerous One”), confronting the stigma of contagion through abstraction rather than figuration. Similarly, José (1991) and 34 com Scars (1993) turn self-portraiture into a minimal, corporeal trace — letters, stitches, and scars standing in for the body itself.
Drawing on the artist’s writings, this paper argues that Leonilson adopts abstraction in a peculiar way, one that operates on multiple levels: conceptually, through the use of bodily fluids as medium; materially, through the phenomenology of textiles linked to his Afro-Brazilian background; and sensorially, through the tactile dimension of sewing as an emotional and ritual act. In doing so, Leonilson articulates a poetics of embodied abstraction that reconfigures the visual and affective experience of illness beyond the biomedical and representational frameworks of AIDS discourse.