Preview evening: Friday 3rd April, 6-8pm
As the social, emotional and welfare costs of Alzheimer’s disease gain prominence, and with the number of sufferers predicted to reach one million by 2025, exploring the ways in which the disease affects the lives of the sufferers and those around them becomes an ever more important task. Responding to this the O3 Gallery in partnership with TORCH present That Other Place, an exhibition exploring Alzheimer’s disease in its various neuropathological manifestations, from the dual perspectives of sufferer and carer.
The reduction in language faculties characteristic of the most common types of Alzheimer’s means that imagery becomes an important (though compromised and diminishing) repository of memory, expression and subjectivity. That Other Place showcases the work of a series of artists working within this theme via the medium of photography and film.
Highlights of the exhibition include Fausto Podovini’s photographic series MIRELLA, which won World Press Photo in 2013. These images chart the decline of the eponymous Mirella’s husband, Luigi, who began to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s aged 65. Mirella cared for Luigi for six years, including during the final year of his life when Luigi no longer recognised his wife. Hayley Morris’s stop motion film UNDONE, winner of the Slamdance Award 2009, poignantly evokes the progressive loss of memory and identity in an Alzheimer’s sufferer. Woodstock-based Nicola Onions presents a series which endeavours to enable an audience, who may not have been affected by dementia, to connect, translate and consider personal existence, ageing and memories.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by Susan Sontag:
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
The gallery can be found at the Oxford Castle Quarter, Oxford, OX1 1AY and is open Tues-Fri 12-5pm, Sat & Sun 11am-4pm and is closed Mondays.
Image: Stills from the stop motion film UNDONE by Hayley Morris, Winner of the Slamdance Award 2009
Humanities & Science
Contact name: Hannah Penny
Contact email: hannah.penny@humanities.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Open to all
Media: That Other Place
