FLARE-UP

Angela de la Cruz, Abi Palmer, Avril Corroon, Bella Milroy, Benoît Piéron, Carolyn Lazard, Christine Sun Kim, Derek Jarman, Félix González-Torres, Freestylers, Jamila Prowse, Jesse Darling, JJJJJerome Ellis, Leah Clements, Lizzy Rose, RA Walden and Rachael 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. These works move outward from lived experience toward intersectional political realities without collapsing difference into universality. 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.

Built in 1898 as a washhouse, the CCA formed part of a civic architecture designed to address health and sanitation in a rapidly urbanising area. Ideas of public health, and the structural conditions that govern illness, are present in a new commission by Avril Corroon that extends her project GOT DAMP (2023), which examines substandard housing conditions in London and Dublin and collective resistance to landlord neglect. The work will use dehumidifier water collected from homes affected by damp as part of an installation and performance that considers the intersection of poverty and health.

State intervention and the expanding authority of medicine and psychology remain materially present in the glazed tiles and exposed pipes that once channelled water to the baths and laundries of the CCA. This architecture connects to Jesse Darling's three-panel altarpiece, The Cleansing of the Temple (Luke 19:46) (2024), which is made from generic white bathroom tiles smeared with dirt, drawing on religious narratives of purification and fears of contagion.

Water recurs across the works of Leah Clements, Lizzy Rose, JJJJJerome Ellis, and RA Walden as a medium that signals fluidity and transformation, in resistance to binary distinctions such as well/unwell, and human/non-human. A major new commission by Leah Clements, titled Pure Joy takes the form of a sound installation recounting a near-death experience that resists scientific explanation. Relayed beneath a suspend