Ex-Voto exhibition – just what the doctor ordered

A new exhibition exploring how medicine, money and politics impact on the human body will open in the City’s Galway Arts Centre this Friday, January 19, at 6pm.

Ex-Voto is a group show about the colonisation of the human body and its treatment by the State, and by corporate, medical and pharmaceutical institutions. It examines people’s experiences of health and illness in this context.

The relationship between institutions and people, the role of power and the impact of capitalism and commerce are investigated by five contemporary visual artists.  Lucy Beech, Jenna Bliss, Cecilia Bullo, Judy Foley, and Rajinder Singh, as well as writer and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson.

Ex-Voto frames the artist as witness, mirroring the theories put forward by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1963 book, The Birth of the Clinic, which addressed the patient’s corporeal experience and vulnerability in the context of modern medicine.

Ex Voto will run until March 10 at the Galway Arts Centre on Dominick Street.