Confabulations
art practice | art history | critical medical humanities
Confabulate (verb):
From the Latin con (with, together) and fabulari (to talk, chat), from fabula (a tale)
1.(formal) To engage in conversation; talk
2.(psychiatry) To fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory
Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities was a two-year series of monthly online events (2021-2023) leading up to an edited volume of texts, artworks, and documentation of artworks, to be published with Bloomsbury Academic in the series Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities.
We envisaged Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities as a new series of urgent conversations on health, medicine, and medicalized bodies triangulating three areas of practice and scholarship, each with their own lineages, disciplinary ambits, and trajectories of remembering and forgetting. Consisting of talks, workshops, readings, performances, and works-in-progress presentations, the series aimed to make explicit the contributions that artists and art historians can make to debates and developments in critical medical humanities and, in turn, to offer ways of expanding the possibilities of art practice and art history. Calling on artists and art historians who are ‘medical humanities curious’ as well as those who already identify with medical humanities, Confabulations aimed to make and hold space for experimentation, risk, and dialogue in the hopes of fostering a community of practitioners and scholars interested in shaping future relations and interdependencies among art practice, art history, and critical medical humanities.
First-wave medical humanities frequently assumed a primarily instrumental attitude towards art and art making. But recent calls for criticality and postcritique are shaping a different epistemological space that emphasizes entanglement, materiality, and affect to imagine inter- and transdisciplinarity otherwise (e.g. Viney, Callard & Woods, 2015; Fitzgerald & Callard, 2016). Confabulations explores how art practice and art history can creatively and perhaps awkwardly operate in this space. How might artists and art historians, with urgent attention paid to constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability, help to ask and address pressing questions about contemporary and historical structures of health- and medical-related experience, knowledge, care, research, and education as these are complexly and unevenly distributed across different histories, geographies, communities, and corporealities? In the belief that these difficult questions demand new ways of thinking and doing, ‘a creative boundary-crossing in and through which new possibilities can emerge’ (Whitehead & Woods, 2016), Confabulations aims to explore the affordances of art’s practices and art’s histories for critical medical humanities.
For John Berger (2016), ‘confabulation’ described the activity of writing as ‘true’ translation, not just between two different languages but also in a triangular relation with the ‘pre-verbal’, implying subtle shifts among ‘voices’ to convey the complexities of human bodily experience. In psychiatry, confabulation denotes the process by which the imagination fills in memory gaps with fabrications that are experienced as if they were real. The series title thus explicitly draws attention to the problems of translating bodily experience into language and, at the same time, to breaches, fissures, and omissions not only in individual memory, but also in collective memory as constructed in and through an archive, a discipline, or a field of practice. And it aims to think about how these might be occupied imaginatively across time and space. In this sense, Confabulations intentionally echoes Saidiya Hartman’s process of ‘critical fabulation’ (2008), a method of research and writing that plays with the basic elements of a historical narrative in order to displace the dominant or authorised point of view. As deeply colonialist in conception and structure, art institutions including art history have long been dominated by period- and geography-specific approaches that constructed and reinforced hierarchical binaries and evolutionary narratives. Confabulations therefore insists on the urgency of decolonial, intersectional, transhistorical, transnational, transgeographical, as well as radically local thinking about health, medicine, and medicalized bodies.
Confabulations is co-directed by Fiona Johnstone (University of Durham); Allison Morehead (Queens University, Canada), and Imogen Wiltshire (University of Lincoln, formerly the University of Leicester), and supported by funding from Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Leicester Wellcome Trust ISSF.
Edited Volume
Art and the Critical Medical Humanities
edited by Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire
Bloomsbury, Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
In press
This agenda-setting edited volume makes a forceful case for the contribution that art – its practices and its histories – can make to debates and developments in the critical medical humanities today.
Whilst medical humanities previously emphasised an instrumental attitude towards art and art-making, recent work has opened up a dynamic space in which art can productively and imaginatively operate. With urgent attention paid to constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality and ability, the artists and academics represented within in this volume address new and pressing questions about structures and experiences of health, medical knowledge, care, and clinical research and education.
With 30 essays by more than 40 contributors from a range of countries including the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia, Spain, and Germany, this landmark collection addresses artworks from the sixteenth century to the present day, serving as a key reference point for researchers, practitioners, and educators working in medical humanities and art-aligned fields alike.
Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA
19 to 21 June 2024, Royal College of Art (RCA) Battersea, London (UK)
Art & the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA was an invitation only, three-day workshop aimed at fostering dialogue, creating connections and activating new entanglements between art-led practices and the critical medical humanities.
The programme for Wednesday 19 June was curated by Gemma Blackshaw and Alice Butler from the Health & Care Research Cluster at the RCA. The day featured talks, performances, screenings and more, all from RCA staff, students and alumni working on the intersection of creative research practices with questions of health and care.
The programme for Thursday 20 and Friday 21 was curated by Confabulations in collaboration with the Visual and Material Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham University. The two days were dedicated to workshopping the contents of the edited volume Art & the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities); and collectively dreaming big and making plans for the future of our field.
This workshop was made possible thanks to generous support from the Royal College of Art and the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University.
Past programme (2021-2023)
Global Bodies: Art, Identities, Encounters since 1800 with Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Keren Hammerschlag, Tania Cleaves (née Woloshyn), Rebecca Whiteley and Sonia Favi. 5th July 2023.
Manual: Broken Bodies for Broken Landscapes with Lorenzo Galgó and Maria Morata. 28th June 2023.
Tiny Motions, Collective Care with Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Karisa Senavitis. 7th June 2023.
Confabulations X Art Hx at “CRITICAL” with Shelley Angelie Saggar, Chimwemwe Phiri, Sadie Levy Gale and Michaela Clark, and chaired by Jessica Womack. 20th April 2023.
Lying In: Bed with Angela Alves, Monika Ankele and Céline Kaiser. 29th March 2023.
Stomach Ache with Vanessa Bartlett, Kathy High, Lindsay Kelley, Claire Hooker and Rachel Marsden.7th March 2023.
Critical Perspectives on Art Therapy with Leah Gipson, Suzanne Hudson and Elizabeth Otto. 8 February 2023.
Institutional violence in mental health: collective listening as practice and protest with Eve Loren. 1st February 2023 (cancelled due to industrial action).
Art and Psychiatric Spaces with speakers Katrin Luchsinger, Rose Ruane and Kaira M. Cabañas. 7th December 2022.
In/From the Asylum with Leslie Topp, Anna Jamieson and Simone Schmidt (performing as fictional ethnomusicologist Simone Carver). 16th November 2022.
“Viral With” with Zoë Mendelson and Marita Fraser. 19th October 2022.
Pathologies, Punchlines, Power: the Medicalized Body, Humour and Art. With Katie Snow, Christine Slobogin and Laura Cowley. 10th August 2022.
Data, devices, diagnosis: Biomedical imaging & artists’ practices. Ilona Sagar and Flis Holland in conversation with Samantha Lippett, and with a response from Jane Macnaughton. 20th July 2022.
(Re)Producing Reproduction: obstetrics, midwifery and mothering. With Jessica Dandona, Vanessa Dion Fletcher and Lyndsay Mann. 8th June 2022.
Infertility and Unpregnancy: Strategies for Transdisciplinary Practice in Art and Medicine. A dialogue between art historian Tamar Tembeck and artist Heidi Barkun, and a response from Isabel Davis. 18th May 2022.
Art Hx X Confabulations at curative/spaces: Art Hx 2022 Symposium. With presentations from Michaela Clark, Chimwemwe Phiri, Shelley Angelie Saggar, and Sadie Levy Gale. 28th April 2022.
Patient-Doctor Intimates. Through art and art historical practice, Olivia Turner and Alison Syme explore the entangled, intimate, and dangerous possibilities of patient-doctor relationships, especially when these identities are embodied by women. 9th March 2022.
Being Horizontal: Vulnerability, Interdependence and Resistance. Curated by Nora Heidorn and featuring films by Nashashibi/Skaer, Teatro da Vertigem, and Kinkaleri, a performance by Harold Offeh, and a conversation with Felicity Callard. 9th February 2022.
What Is “Lived Experience”? This event brought together artist Daniel Regan and historian Chris Millard in a conversation on the use of the term ‘lived experience’ in the arts, health, and academic sectors. 12th January 2022.
Medical Imaging and the Contemporary Clinical Encounter. A panel presentation and roundtable conversation with Silvia Casini, Beverley Hood and Liz Orton. 8th December 2021.
Feelings, Objects, Altars: Using the ‘Bibliographic Altar’ to Explore Depression. A participatory workshop curated by Julie Hollenbach and Robin Alex McDonald and guided by Justice Walz. 24th November 2021.
Correspondence as Care: Writing to Bessie and Cookie. A presentation and discussion of work in progress by Gemma Blackshaw and Alice Butler. 6th October 2021.
Sources cited:
Berger, John. Confabulations (Penguin, 2016)
Fitzgerald, Des and Felicity Callard, “Entangling the Medical Humanities,” in The Edinburgh
Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Angela Whitehead and Angela Woods, eds (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 35–49.
Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14.
Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods. “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” BMJ Medical Humanities 4 (2015): 2–7.
Whitehead, Anne and Angela Woods, Introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1–31.