Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Auto/Pathographies offers a unique perspective on the subject of illness and the body by departing from tendencies to gaze and quickly consume diseased bodies as sites of spectacle, heroic suffering, and victory. Rather, the intention presented here is to activate in the observer a sense of corporality and existential engagement in relation to the unique processes of living, enacting, and even dying through illness and disease. As the cover image of this catalogue suggests, a good portion of the exhibition is devoted to the art and life of British photographer Jo Spence (1934 - 1992) and the body of work, which she created surrounding her own fight with breast cancer. This includes rarely seen works by Spence including photographs from The Final Project (1991-1992). The exhibition, which this catalogue documents, is the product of two residences undertaken by author Tamar Tembeck beginning in 2008 at the artist-run centre OBORO in Montreal, and a residence - based International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen at Innsbruck, Austria, in 2009. That same year, Tembeck also curated the exhibition "Auto/Pathographies" in Innsbruck's Kunstpavillion. This was further expanded upon in the 2012 exhibition back at OBORO in Montreal. In total, the work of ten artists were curated for this exhibition including: Susan B. Markisz, Pam Patterson, Pascal Dufaux, Chantal duPont, Carl Bouchard, Christina Lammer, Terry Dennett, Angela Ellsworth, and Tina Takemoto. Moreover, it is through the work of such artists that Tembeck finds the idea of representing disease in the first person, which she titles "autopathography," as both complicated and enriched by these artist's approaches, who engage individually and/or through collaborative practices, between artists and medical personnel, family and loved ones, as well as with other artists. As Tembeck notes, while we may confront our own sickness and mortality as an individual, we rarely undergo such experiences in insolation, thus the expansion of the term autopathography into Auto/pathographies, which takes into account individual and collaborative experience and practice (8).
Repository Citation
Lim, Sandra. "Review of Auto/Pathographies, Edited by Tamar Tembeck." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss1/10