Highly recommended is a forthcoming seminar to be held at the Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London by Dr Matha Fleming. Dr Fleming is a museum professional and academic working in the interdisciplinary nexus between the sciences, the humanities and the fine arts: her work over several decades has forged innovative and productive methodological alignments across disciplines.
For the past two years, Dr Fleming has been involved in the strategic development of the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the Natural History Museum. Recent projects include Creative Direction of the Dibner Award winning exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine at the Medical Museion of the University of Copenhagen, where she was also a Visiting Professor with the Faculty of Health from 2006-2009.
The seminar will illuminate a fundamental love shared by artists and doctors – that is, a love for humankind. Artists and doctors observe and interpret the human body and the world we are surrounded by.
At times, both artists and doctors seek to change the human body, as if changing its appearance, through the mediums of colors and canvasses, scalpels or surgeries, can alter its fatalistic discourse. The discussion will explore the historical revealing relationship between both practitioners, and the intellectual, social and professional complexes in which these relationships sit.
Representational, technological and ethical epistemologies can be traced in the performed intimacies of such self-reflexive clinical arenas. Examples from both physiological and psychiatric medicine are explored, in pairings from Goya and Arrieta through Munch and Jakobsen as well as Duchamp and Dumouchel and beyond. Painting, engraving, photography and sculpture from approximately 1750 to 1990 are addressed.
All are welcome, and RSVP is not required. For further information, please see:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/chh/events/CHHseminars.aspx