Wellcome Collection’s winter exhibition, ‘Foreign Bodies, Common Ground’, offers a unique exploration of global health, bringing together artworks, including painting, photography, sculpture, film and performance, made during residencies at medical research centres funded by the Wellcome Trust in six countries, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam and the UK. The contributing artists were given a simple and wide-ranging brief: to find out about research being undertaken and produce work responding to their investigations. The result is a series of moving, challenging and humorous works, richly varied in form and tone, recording journeys taken within the complex realm that lies between scientific processes and local communities, often on the frontlines of communicable diseases.

Whilst the tools and objectives of scientific research may be broadly agreed, the social relevance of vital work is often shaped by cultural contexts, and it is here, amidst ambiguities, frictions and negotiated understandings, that the keen and curious eyes of artists can bring fresh perspectives. ‘Foreign Bodies, Common Ground’ outlines the intricate web of relationships upon which the future health of communities depends. Collaborative exchanges on data collection and use, the spread of disease and ideas, the motivations of participants and researchers and the role of trust, give rise to art animated by the search for connections between mindsets and datasets.

Lêna Bùi’s drawings, photography, video and installation explore zoonosis, the transfer of disease from animals to humans. Her work is visceral, tracing the relationship between the consumption of animals and the conditions of their breeding, killing and packaging in Vietnam. Bùi’s art explores the lives of rural communities classified as ‘high risk cohorts’, from abattoir workers to feather harvesters, revealing intimate and sometimes fragile lifelines between human and animal worlds. Working with the teams at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, her work celebrates the unexpected messiness and uncertainties of the research she encounters and the sensitivities involved in gathering data.

Katie Paterson’s interest in animals takes a longer view. Time spent in the labs at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge inspired her enquiry into genomic archaeology and the result, ‘Fossil Necklace’, is nothing less than a biological history of the planet. Each of the work’s 170 beads is carved from a fossil representing a major event in the evolution of life. The first beads are billions of years old and relate to single cell organisms. The emergence of humans and our ancestors come late in the chain. Paterson’s work tells a global story of our deep rooted connections with each other and other species, charting an extraordinary history of life, health and survival through the physical impressions of lives long passed.

Elson Kambalu’s residency explored the different understandings of medicine and research in Malawi. Fascinated by the cultural complexities that both divide and unite research teams at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme and the communities they work within, Kambalu interviewed clinicians and traditional herbalists, chiefs and study participants, community workers and pharmacologists, health economists and musicians. Earth murals and graffiti displayed in the exhibition, created by women and children in Chikhwawa, dramatise concerns of health and access to care through a traditional decorative form. Kambalu’s own works, the larger than life ‘Kafukufuku Man’ and ‘Kafukufuku Women’ address cultural fears of drawing blood and refer to local fables used as a means of translating medical terms and techniques. Intricate threads connect Kambalu’s sculptures to the gallery space, pointing to the tangled interconnectedness of individuals, beliefs and community and their sense of kafukufuku – ‘research’ in Malawi’s Chichewa language.

B-Floor Theatre are Thailand’s vanguard physical theatre company. Their performance ‘Survival Games’ unpacked the challenges facing immunologists at the Wellcome Trust-Mahidol University-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Programme, from malaria research on the Thai-Myanmar border, where nine languages are spoken, to the world’s highest rate of melioidosis, a bacterial infection picked up through the soil by rice farmers in Udon Ratchanthani. The exhibition features footage and a photographic montage of the B-Floor’s research and performance, whilst a vertical shadow puppet installation stretches from gallery floor to ceiling and carries the company’s wryly comic vision of participants in the research process and the battle between humans and ever-mutating diseases, driven by the survival instincts of both.

Miriam Syowia Kyambi and James Muriuki’s work gets to the heart of the ethical dilemmas and negotiations that arise in encounters between different belief systems and cultural values in Kenya. Exploring thematic pathways: education, belief, context, money, power and exploration; whilst in residency at the Kemri-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, the artists developed the Pata Picha Photo Studio, a mobile set outfitted with props connected to these paths, which members of the public could pose with. Conversations in the studio revealed many of the community’s expectations, tensions, hopes and fears about scientific research. The studio will be operating within ‘Foreign Bodies, Common Ground’, alongside portraits taken in Kilifi, and artworks developed throughout the residency.

Photographs from the workshops at the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa put a human face to data collection. A cornerstone of the Africa Centre’s work to understand the HIV epidemic are systematic demographic surveys. The nine photographs on display acknowledge the contribution of the Mtubatuba community to this work. Following workshops with artist Zwelethu Mthethwa, the young photographers whose work is displayed were given cameras and a task of exploring ‘impilo engcono’ or good health. From Sanele Mbokazi’s ‘Splash’ with its bathing subject, to Sebenzile Nkwnyana ‘Save Me’ featuring a church bound boy carrying a condom, the images make direct intersections with the health research of the Centre, pointing to themes such as contaminated water, religion and contraception. But these photographs vividly bring out the lives behind the datasets, the cross dresser in Sizwe Magcaba’s ‘Fun Day’, the yogi in Nothando Sabela’s ‘Vinyasa Flow 2’, the mud painted woman in Mpumelelo Mkhwanazi’s ‘Working Mothers’ – these portraits are striking personal records of everyday live, remarkable for their diversity and immediacy.

Danielle Olsen, exhibition curator, says: “‘Foreign Bodies, Common Ground’ is the result of six very different journeys united by a generous and collaborative exchange of ideas. Placing artists within scientific research institutions is one small way of bridging discourses and practices, creating opportunities for self-reflection. The exhibition asks questions about what we understand by global health and the wonderfully rich body of artworks on display offers moving and often unexpected insights into scientific processes and the community relationships upon which those processes depend.”

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Related images

  1. Sebenzile Nkwanyana, Save Me, 2012, Courtesy the artist
  2. Siboniso Bhekumusa Sibiya, The Fountain, 2012, Courtesy the artist
  3. Mpumelelo Mkhwanazi, Working Mothers, 2012, Courtesy the artist
  4. Children's graffiti, 2012, Courtesy of Elson Kambalu and the children of Mawila Primary School, Chikhwawa
  5. Faines Diwa, Soil Painting, 2012, Courtesy of the artist and Elson Kambalu
  6. Children's graffiti, 2012, Courtesy of Elson Kambalu and the children of Mawila Primary School, Chikhwawa