Near death experiences, ‘crip memes’ and the tyranny of the DWP: the new exhibition powered by illness and disability

Bunting from hospital sheets, drawings on letters from the DWP, an installation made of damp: a new exhibition celebrates art that takes the challenges the artists have faced and turns them into drivers of creativity

“I’m having a flare-up’, is a really common phrase that you hear in the ‘crip’ community,” says Mariana Lemos, the co-curator of Flare Up, a group exhibition focused on art powered by illness, chronic conditions, disability, neurodivergence and deafness. The show includes artists who do and don’t identify as ‘crip’ (a defiant reclaiming of derogatory slang) and underlines the ebb and flow of symptoms to explore illness as anything but static. A flare, adds Lemos’s collaborator Natasha Hoare, “brings light to things that have been kept in the dark, ignored or invisible-ised. There’s a sense of celebration to it, perhaps.”

This would seem to be the case for French artist Benoît Piéron, a leading figure among artists addressing illness and who now also has a big solo show at Paris’s edgiest art space, Palais de Tokyo. In Flare Up, his pastel bunting crisscrosses a ceiling, before pooling on the floor in a heap, its energy apparently drained. Cut from hospital sheets, the party flags defy the infantilised days of the bedbound. The fabric, in its typically soothing nursery colours, has also soaked up the seeping life of the bodies it hides: be that fever sweats or sex. Piéron’s subtle, poetic reminder of the physical reality of an ill person, as well as the ups and downs of a chronic condition, is typical across the exhibition’s witty, ever-surprising artworks.

The subject matter includes near-death experiences, religion’s obsession with purity, “crip” memes and the tyranny of government paperwork that those unable to work must navigate. Water is a recurring motif, from healing baths to marine ecology and pollution, something that’s grittily brought home in Avril Corroon’s creation exploring how poverty impacts health. The water dripping on to a deep shag rug in the artist’s work was gathered from dehumidifiers in damp, mould-blighted homes in Dublin and south-east London.

One of the exhibition’s earliest works is Derek Jarman’s huge 1992 painting Act Up, a call to arms against the prejudice he witnessed around Aids. In Jarman’s lifetime, activist art of this kind struggled for exposure and it is notable that the show’s younger cohort includes those whose creative achievements have been recognised within major institutions. Last year, New York’s Whitney museum surveyed Christine Sun Kim’s work exploring deaf experience; Jesse Darling, whose sculpture probing bodily fragility draws on his experiences of temporary paralysis after a serious neurological condition, won the UK’s Turner prize in 2023.

The curators say that the pandemic has been a powerful driver of interest in, and understanding of, living with illness or disability. “We’ve all realised our vulnerability, and it’s really highlighted that pressure in capitalist society to have a productive body and be constantly working,” says Hoare.

At the same time, attacks on disabled people are increasing, from government cuts to essential benefits to the growing verbal abuse of disabled drivers recently highlighted in the Guardian. “We’re mindful of the burgeoning language around disability, being part of a national narrative,” Hoare says. “We need to challenge the pejorative idea of disabled communities as not being productive, therefore having no value socially, which is complete fallacy.”

This is poignantly brought home in a 40-minute video by Freestylers, a collective of disabled and neurodivergent performance artists. In a mashup of the group’s activities across dance, satirical skits and revelatory monologues, the challenges its artists have faced become drivers of creativity. The title sums it up: Honey, You Are Art.

Flare-Up is at CCA Goldsmiths, London, to 16 August.

‘There’s a sense of celebration, perhaps’: five highlights of Flare-Up

Main image: Racheal Crowther – Qualified to Care (2022)
Crowther found this discarded beacon of care, an LED pharmacy sign in Lewisham, south-east London, and hacked its software to display her own video footage of a Peckham day care centre for adults with learning disabilities, which was set for demolition.

Derek Jarman – Act Up (1992)
The great experimental film-maker scored the name of the campaign group Act Up (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), in angry capitals into thick expressive paint, a marker of the fierce energy he poured into Aids awareness and activism. Jarman’s piece is on display in the show, and the artist Benoît Piéron homages him in a sculpture using seed samples from Jarman’s Dungeness garden.

Abi Palmer – Slime Mother (2024)
Palmer turns a slug, a creature that usually gives people the ick, into an object of worship in this droll sculpture. In its shimmering alien wetness, it becomes a celebration of bodies that defy the norm, be that in terms of queer desire, or accepting the slimy emissions of illness.

Bella Milroy – Violence in the Form Of Stationery (2018)
Bella Millroy’s drawings and text works capture their everyday world at home including their animal companions. But there’s a steely edge to these domestic observations, drawn as they are on the brown A5 envelopes from the Department for Work and Pensions, whose approvals or denials of payments for those unable to work are life-altering.

Lizzy Rose – Sick, Blue Sea (2018)
The late artist Lizzy Rose turned the real-life case of a whale that died on the coast near Margate into video art that is as oddly funny as it is touching. It’s told from the whale’s perspective, and we watch as she tries to seek solace in online communities, looking for answers to an illness we know was caused by swallowing plastic, but that tragically, she can’t understand.