Near death experiences, ‘crip memes’ and the tyranny of the DWP: the new exhibition powered by illness and disability

Bunting from hospital sheets, drawings on letters from the DWP, an installation made of damp: a new exhibition celebrates art that takes the challenges the artists have faced and turns them into drivers of creativity

“I’m having a flare-up’, is a really common phrase that you hear in the ‘crip’ community,” says Mariana Lemos, the co-curator of Flare Up, a group exhibition focused on art powered by illness, chronic conditions, disability, neurodivergence and deafness. The show includes artists who do and don’t identify as ‘crip’ (a defiant reclaiming of derogatory slang) and underlines the ebb and flow of symptoms to explore illness as anything but static. A flare, adds Lemos’s collaborator Natasha Hoare, “brings light to things that have been kept in the dark, ignored or invisible-ised. There’s a sense of celebration to it, perhaps.”

This would seem to be the case for French artist Benoît Piéron, a leading figure among artists addressing illness and who now also has a big solo show at Paris’s edgiest art space, Palais de Tokyo. In Flare Up, his pastel bunting crisscrosses a ceiling, before pooling on the floor in a heap, its energy apparently drained. Cut from hospital sheets, the party flags defy the infantilised days of the bedbound. The fabric, in its typically soothing nursery colours, has also soaked up the seeping life of the bodies it hides: be that fever sweats or sex. Piéron’s subtle, poetic reminder of the physical reality of an ill person, as well as the ups and downs of a chronic condition, is typical across the exhibition’s witty, ever-surprising artworks.