A new exhibition showcasing work done in collaboration with mental health charity, Hospital Rooms, is coming to Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row location this summer. Hospital rooms: as if there is hope and I can dream of another world (August 19-September 14) will feature works by artists Mark Titchner, Harold Offeh and Michelle Williams Gamaker and includes Titchner’s new 15m-long painting from which the exhibition takes its name. Beginning September 7, other works, by Amy Sherald, Pipilloti Rist and others, will also be on display at the gallery and will be sold at a live fundraising auction on September 14.
Founded by artist-curator couple Tim A. Shaw and Niamh White, Hospital Rooms aims to provide people using hospital mental health services with a more welcoming and dignified environment through site-specific artwork. and museum quality. The organization also offers creative outlets through workshops. Previous projects in UK hospitals have included the likes of Sonia Boyce, Thomas J. Price, Julian Opie and Sutapa Biswas.
Hospital Rooms’ first project was in 2016 at the Phoenix Unit, a rehabilitation unit for people diagnosed with schizophrenia in south-west London. Artists such as Gavin Turk and Nick Knight and the Assemble art collective were commissioned to help transform the clinical walls of Springfield University Hospital into a model that has propelled the organization across the country and even internationally.
A recent project took place at Torbay Hospital in Devon. In 2015, Torbay was described as “the most deprived local authority area in the South West region”. For artist Tanoa Sasraku, who grew up in nearby Plymouth, taking part was an opportunity to engage with the community in her home region. Incorporating the red cliffs of Devon into her work and workshops, she became clear about the role of the hospital environment in preparing service users to ‘re-enter the world’ and the opportunity for art, with its ability to transcend and re-imagine experiences, to help this
In Lagos, Nigeria, cultural strategist Ebisan Akisanya and artist Nnegi Omuku are exporting the Hospital Rooms model to help deal with the city’s mental health crisis. As part of their project with the Lagos University Teaching Hospital psychiatric ward, they are working with artists Deborah Segun, Olumide Onadipe and Kwado Asiedu to commission art and teach patients and healthcare workers new creative skills. Both are optimistic about the model’s ability to have an impact in Nigeria, where hospital funding is often dire, and state funding for mental health services is almost non-existent. The art, Omuku says, helps give those who use and work in the psychiatric wards a sense of dignity and functions as a form of “escapism.” While the current project is in its early planning stages, the couple are already in talks with the hospital to transform three other spaces.
From left to right: Hospital Rooms COO Natalie Tilbury; the artist Tanoa Sasraku; Baroness Mary Watkins of Tavistock; the artist Nengi Omuku; and cultural strategist Ebisan Akisanya Photo: Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth
However, not everyone is so optimistic about the efficacy of art-focused mental health interventions. In a talk last week at Hauser & Wirth, the latest in a three-part series celebrating Hospital Rooms’ “historic partnership” with the mega gallery to raise £1m over the next three years, members of the audience wondered if by “beautifying coercive spaces” such as hospital psychiatric wards (which still allow involuntary commitment in the UK), organizations such as Hospital Rooms were, in fact, overlooking inadequate mental health care and praising the flawed spaces.
For Shaw, however, the beauty of the project lies in its ability to commission challenging work, not in the cosmetic redecoration of “pies” and “recovery trees” that hospital trusts often fall for. According to Shaw, this keeps Hospital Rooms resistant to the idea of “utopia” and instead, as the title of Titchner’s work suggests, allows them to focus on empowering mental health service users to “dream of another world.” ”.
Titchner’s painting will be installed in the Rivers Centre, a new mental health unit at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, in 2024.
