Confabulations - Being Horizontal: Vulnerability, Interdependence and Resistance An online event comprising artist films, live performance and discussion

This online event comprises artist films, live performance and discussion, and is curated by Nora Heidorn.
It features films by Nashashibi/Skaer, Kinkaleri, and Teatro da Vertigem, and a performance by Harold Offeh, followed by a conversation with Felicity Callard.

The standard enlightenment representation of the human body is of a singular, upright, able-bodied man, gazing forward. Starting from a subjective and partial selection of contemporary artworks and research images, this curatorial project wants to pay caring attention to images of reclined bodies.

We encounter reclined bodies in different situations in our visual cultures, including persons sleeping or resting, having sex, the unwell, injured or deceased. Visual tropes include the reclined nude, the fallen soldier, the psychoanalysis patient, and the birthing woman. Being horizontal, and especially being looked at and imaged in positions of recline, is often associated with feminised and/or racialised powerlessness. Deliberately assuming a horizontal position in front of others can also, as the complex works grouped in this project reveal, challenge, subvert, and politicise dynamics of vulnerability and power.

How might the simple but charged acts of reclining, lounging, collapsing, or reversing be reimagined as critiques of the neoliberal drives for efficiency, productivity, speed, and independence? The project explores what individual and collective orientations and movements out of the vertical plane and into varying degrees of incline might indicate about being in relation, about interdependency and care. With this event, especially the concluding discussion, I am interested to explore these questions with particular attention to the embodied dynamics of verticality and horizontality in clinical encounters with a critical medical humanities audience.

Inspired by Adrianna Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, "Being Horizontal" pays critical and caring attention to images of reclined bodies. The standard enlightenment representation of the human body is of a singular, upright, able-bodied man, gazing forward. We encounter reclined bodies in different situations in our visual cultures, including persons sleeping or resting, having sex, the unwell, injured or deceased. Visual tropes include the reclined nude, the fallen soldier, the psychoanalysis patient, and the birthing woman. Being horizontal, and especially being looked at and imaged in positions of recline, is often associated with feminised and/or racialised powerlessness. Deliberately assuming a horizontal position in front of others can also, as the complex works grouped together here reveal, challenge, subvert, and politicise dynamics of vulnerability and power. 

“Being Horizontal" explores what individual and collective orientations and movements out of the vertical plane and into varying degrees of incline might indicate about being in relation, about interdependency and care. For example, how might the simple but charged acts of reclining, lounging, collapsing, or reversing be reimagined as critiques of the neoliberal drives for efficiency, productivity, speed, and independence? This event explores these questions with particular attention to the embodied dynamics of verticality and horizontality in clinical encounters with a critical medical humanities audience.

For full details and to book: https://confabulationsdotorg.wordpress.com/programme-spring-2022/being-horizontal-vulnerability-interdependence-and-resistance/

Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities is a new series of urgent conversations on health, medicine, and medicalised 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 online series intends 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 aims 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.

Confabulations is convened by Fiona Johnstone (Durham University, UK), Allison Morehead (Queen’s University, Canada) and Imogen Wiltshire (University of Leicester, UK). We gratefully acknowledge the support of Durham University, Institute for Medical Humanities, UK, the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research, UK, Queen’s University, Katarokwi (Kingston), Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Leicester Wellcome Trust ISSF.

This event is online via Zoom and is free to attend but you must register to receive the Zoom link -CLICK HERE TO BOOK