Confabulations - Feelings, Objects, Altars: Using the ‘Bibliographic Altar’ to Explore Depression

Expanding on Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of the “bibliographic altar” to include artworks like Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) and Justice Walz’s Anxiety Escape Kit (2017), this event invites participants to create their own versions of “bibliographic altars” through sculpture, assemblage, writing, listing, or drawing. Curated by Julie Hollenbach and Robin Alex McDonald and guided by Justice Walz. For further details and to book: https://confabulationsdotorg.wordpress.com/programme-fall-2021/feelings-objects-altars/

Julie Hollenbach (she/her) is a queer cis-woman of German ancestry born on unceded Syilx territory, now living on unceded Mi’kmaq territory, working as an Assistant Professor of Craft History and Material Culture at NSCAD University.

Robin Alex McDonald is an academic, independent curator and arts writer currently living and working on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people and, specifically, the Nipissing First Nation.

Justice Walz is an interdisciplinary artist and brand designer based in Toronto.

Image details: Justice Walz, Anxiety Escape Kit, 2017. As displayed in The Sustenance Rite. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. 

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 - register here