When tuberculosis comes back in the most romantic glory of its drug resistence, when another epidemics, the mad cow disease or bird flu have just had expired, when despite of successes in medicine cancer takes a heavy harvest of victims, when the AIDS pandemic doesn’t stop to be a permanent element of social landscape, it is worth to take a closer look at the pictures caused by the disease. In her two classic essays: Illness as Methapor and AIDS and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag indicates how culturally created images of diseases – fantasies about them, steretypes, myths – not only distort the medical image of them, in fact not having a lot in common with it, but what is more, they define the situation of the ill.

The patient falls victim more to the cultural image surrounding the sickness, than to the biological factor that causes it. Therefore recognizing the cultural image seems as important as recognizing the picture. Especially since the word epidemic itself became one of the most general metaphors in contemporary culture.

curators: Kamil Kuskowski & Jarosław Lubiak

Actual Art Zona / Zona Sztuki Aktualnej
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