curated by Philipp Lange and Sophia Yvette Scherer

works by Rebekka Benzenberg, Catherina Cramer & Sabine Bremer, Jesse Darling, Sharona Franklin, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi, Louis Hay, Abi Palmer, Benoît Piéron, and Lyndsey Walsh

In a bureaucratic and administrative sense, sick days are defined as a physical or mental absence from productive work within an employment relationship. According to this logic, which is permeated by capitalist tendencies, work interrupted by sick leave is regarded as a lack of performance. Particularly in current political debates, rising sickness absence is stigmatised and ableist ideas are even fuelled, thereby creating a sense of shame around the subjective experience of temporary exclusion. The work of independent artists, which is significantly less protected under labour law, requires artistic strategies in the event of Illness that address limited creative scope, interrupted careers and the subsequent realignment of one’s path. This inevitably opens up politicised dimensions between work and living situations, for example with regard to the availability of accessible studio spaces.

Yet all sick days have one thing in common: they are days, weeks or months of deeply intimate engagement with the body’s own complexity. In Sick Days, nine artistic positions explore these conditions and their personal experiences with health-related, chronic, and in some cases lifelong limitations, and the associated consequences for navigating everyday life and social interaction. The works presented at Studio Hanniball are based on an alternative understanding of time that questions normative and productive notions and can be summarised under the concept of “Crip Time”. Moments of care and tranquillity, along with overcoming various barriers, are deliberately incorporated into these works.

Drawing on the original function of Studio Hanniball's building complex as a residential home for both the elderly and single people in the early 20th century, the group exhibition takes the domestic setting – situated between spatial isolation and communal living – as an thematic point of departure. The home is not only relevant as a topos of care work, but is in itself a central site in the negotiation of illness. Consequently, living and working within one’s own four walls not only influences, limits or expands the artistic work; it also appears as a recurring motif in the artistic engagement with illness, recovery and (self-)care. Particularly the bed is considered a place of retreat, refuge and healing, but also of pleasure, lethargy, exhaustion and creativity. Thus, the feminist writer and activist Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012), who lived with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, condenses autofictionalised experiences of endless sleep and sleepless nights during a period of illness in her prose text ‘Bedtime is the Best Time of Day’ (1988). In this liminal state of supposed recovery, psychological vulnerability is revealed alongside social alienation.

How do mind and body fare in the interplay of exhaustion, regeneration and supposed (dys)functionality? What happens to our perception of existence when explicit incapacity and limitations are recognised as valid narratives? In the exhibited installations, short films, photographs and sculptures, the question of well-being, self-empowerment and individualised approaches to dealing with pain, limitations, societal expectations of healing and acceptance is ever-present. Sick Days seeks to raise awareness of the omnipresence of illness, despite its frequent invisibility and its consequent perceived lack of presence in the public consciousness.

The exhibition is supported by the Pankow Borough Office – Office of Continuing Education and Culture in Pankow.