Between: Curating Representations of the Embodied Brain

Abstract

This review is a reflection on the interdisciplinary exhibition and public engagement project Between: Embodiment and Identity (2012–13), co-curate­d by Karen Ingham with fellow artist–curator Susan Aldworth. It focuses on the 2012 manifestation of the project in the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House in London. Between questioned how the material relationship of brain to body influences the philosophical and metaphorical relationship of mind to matter, and how understandings of personal identity are influenced by a scientific culture that represents illness as disembodied digital data sets and 3-D computer-generated visualizations. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan may be able to visually indicate where pain or a tumour is located in the body but it cannot actually convey what pain ‘feels’ like. This imagery of science, with its own distinct cultural potency and difference of interpretation, was explored and challenged by the project through the curation of artworks that offered a more holistic understanding of the brain and the illnesses that are a product of its disorder.