This was an exhibition curated by Zoë Mendelson at The Glasgow School of Art, which included facsimiles of artefacts from GSA Archives & Collections, and works by:

H. Baldwin,
Diogo Gama,
Michelle Hannah,
Alek Mechlinski,
Catarina Moura,
Abi Palmer,
Alex Veness,
John Walter

The exhibition, which was hung along a single wall, engaged visually with a critique of medicine and the industrial complex of the wellbeing industry via artworks that (through fantasy, object-hood, narrative and realism) allowed multiple views of a complex subject. Artists were invited to exhibit specific works convening around il-being as a producer of valuable knowledges and possibilities. As a connecting device, a 28.5 metre-length printed curtain on NHS tracking (by Zoë Mendelson) held the works into ward-like bays, concealing and revealing them through the exhibition.

Margaret Salmon and Elizabeth Hodson contributed a screening and discussion event to the exhibition.

The exhibition text is below:

In Exquisite, Imaginary Cure a projected idea of a space beyond the current body is anticipated and articulated. This is an imaginary realm, a functional medical landscape, an invented suite of elixirs, a dressing, a prosthetic, Oz.

This exhibition engages the medical as a critical landscape (beyond assumption and the prejudicial) within which what is offered isn’t just swallowed but is questioned and fed back. It projects a space for ill-being as a form of deep knowledge and necessary fantasy. It refutes the industrial complex of wellbeing as a success narrative and asks whether there is space for critical advocacy from within the wild imaginings and hallucinatory experiences of chronic health.

Artefacts and artworks are drawn into a space occupied by a medicalised curtain - theatrical, clinical. Holding the exhibition together is an account of the time, in 1917, when the Glasgow School of Art gave up some of its spaces to the drying and preparation of sphagnum moss used in dressings for wounds.

This transformative use of the site is engaged here as a prompt for thinking - how can we engage the art space as an agitator to provoke a rethinking of fast and dismissive medicine, engaging drying time (a slow curing) and the imaginary.

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Exquisite, Imaginary Cure (curtain) is a curatorial conceit as well as an artwork of itself. It wraps and cares for the other works in the show, as well as veiling them from view. Using the procuring and drying of antiseptic moss (at the Art School in 1917) as a device through which to talk about the mopping, patting or painting of wounds, the curtain folds the other works into the possibility of a cure, when this may just be window dressing.