Wojtek Bąkowski Wojciech Duda Tomasz Bajer Karol Radziszewski Jadwiga Sawicka Dorota Chilińska Tatiana Czekalska & Leszek Golec Bogna Burska Artur Malewski Anna Orlikowska Andrzej Wasilewski Aleksandra Ska
Epidemic. The Cultural Image of a Disease.
23.01.2009 - 28.02.2009
When tuberculosis comes back in the ever-romantic glare of its drug resistance; when yet another epidemic, be it BSE or the „bird flu”, just abates; when despite the achievements of medicine, cancer still takes its toll; when AIDS pandemic is a permanent element of the social landscape – all this considered, maybe it's worth to take a closer look at the images the notions of a disease create.
In her two classic essays, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag presents how the culturally constructed images of diseases – fantasies, stereotypes, myths – distort illness's medical reality, but also how these images determinate the social status of sick people. A sick person becomes a victim of metaphors surrounding illness rather than of what actually causes the disease. Thus, to recognize the culturally constructed image seems just as important as a diagnosis of a disease itself. Especially that the very term „epidemic” is one of the most general metaphors for modern culture.
curators: Kamil Kuskowski | Jarosław Lubiak
