Flare-Up

The first institutional exhibition in London to bring together UK-based and international visual artists engaging with illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness.

Artists: Angela de la Cruz, Abi Palmer, Avril Corroon, Bella Milroy, Benoît Piéron, Carolyn Lazard, Christine Sun Kim, Derek Jarman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Freestylers, Jamila Prowse, Jesse Darling, JJJJJerome Ellis, Leah Clements, Lizzy Rose, RA Walden and Racheal Crowther.

Flare-Up will be the first institutional exhibition in London to bring together UK-based and international visual artists whose work engages with the poetics and aesthetics of illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness. Presenting work by seventeen artists across Goldsmiths CCA, the exhibition brings together sculpture, installation, painting, film, poetry, music and performance as tools of expression and activism.

A flare-up refers to the fluctuating intensification of symptoms associated with chronic conditions; in music, a flare is a surge in volume or energy – an escalation that can also be celebratory. The exhibition draws on this affective quality, presenting works that use light, sound and water to engage with transcendence, mourning and joy. Many works address the daily rituals of care – or survival – alongside the labour of access. They also attend to the spiritual and redemptive, whether through hope placed in a medical system where much remains unexplained, or through the bodily and emotional intensities of pain, exclusion and alienation, intercut with intimacy and pleasure.

The exhibition attends to the reclamation of crip identity – the strategic reappropriation of a pejorative term to forge political agency, collectivity and pride. Influenced by queer and feminist thought, “crip” operates here as a critical framework through which some artists align their work. Flare-Up does not impose a singular definition; rather, it presents multiplicity, contradiction and interdependency.

The flare is not a singular event. It is a condition of intensification. It names the escalation of symptoms, the flash of illumination, the surge of sound. It marks rupture and gathering simultaneously. Across the CCA’s tiled surfaces and exposed pipes – remnants of earlier regimes of hygiene and control – artists assemble other infrastructures: of care, of memory and of resistance.

Curated by Natasha Hoare and Mariana Lemos.

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