This lecture is part of the Master of Visual Studies Proseminar series. It is open to the public and registration is not required.

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In the artists' roundtable for Sick Theories: Sickness & Sexuality, ideas of "sickness” will be taken up from the perspective of contemporary artists' practices, speaking with visual artists about their work in the context of this transdisciplinary colloquium. As a word, illness operates to make the realities of sickness more palatable for the neoliberal, capitalist world that depends upon the oppression of the sick body and labels it as unproductive. Sickness demarcates the messiness, ugliness, and inexplicable nature of disease, bringing us back to the original meaning of disease as dis-ease. What does it mean to be sick, as opposed to being ill, and how do artists transmute their experiences of sickness in their work? What directions might critical disability studies, mad studies, sexual diversity studies, and queer theory take us as we reconsider what it means to be sick, and how do artists' practice extend or complicate these knowledges? Sick Theories centers the work of those artists with lived experience of being sick, and approaches these topics through frameworks of intersectional feminism. The artists Carly Mandel (Wellness Prototypes), amber williams-king (3 o’clock), Megan Moore (Mnemonic Specimens), Heather Huston (Waiting Room), Frances Maranger (Bearded Ladies), and Gloria Swain(Madness & Black Lives Matter) will discuss their art practices in relation to the ideas taken up in the Sick Theories conference. The roundtable will be followed by a screening of film and video works by Alexis Bulman, Angela Glanzmann, Elif Isikozlu, Lynx Sainte-Marie, and Gloria C. Swain, and a presentation of performance art by artists lo bil and Kristel Jax. 

For more information about the conference: https://www.sicktheories.com/conference/