CASEBOOKS curated by Michael Maziere is a major exhibition investigating one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. Internationally renowned contemporary artists Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers and Tunga present a diverse and radical range of responses to the manuscripts of seventeenth-century English astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier. The 64 leather-bound volumes contain thousands of consultations made over nearly forty years relating to general health, disease and other afflictions of mind and body, as well as questions about sex, romance and marriage, job prospects and political and economic matters.
Inspired by ideas of alchemy, astrology, power, prophecy, knowledge and the materiality and content of the archive, CASEBOOKS presents six new works spanning sculpture, video and audio installation, live performance, robotics and artificial intelligence. The artists worked closely with the University of Cambridge’s Casebooks Project, a ten-year long digitisation of the entire archive currently held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford

Maziere, M.

A film of the exhibition Casebooks commissioned by the University of Cambridge and Ambika P3. Cinematographer Hugh Wahl

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CASEBOOKS  Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive - Film

Science at the University of Cambridge. The original casebooks are held at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, which has given the Casebooks Project access to the documents and granted permission for the use of digital images of them. A team of editors has been working since 2007 to transcribe, categorise and link information about patients, their questions, their households and networks contained in the casebooks. The Casebooks Project aims to make these records and the world in which they were produced understandable and accessible through a digital platform. 48,500 cases are currently live and the work is scheduled for completion in 2018. Edited cases are available on the project website, and a full set of images of the volumes can be viewed at the Cambridge Digital Library. www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/ www.cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/casebooks WellcomeWellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We’re a global charitable foundation, both politically and ﬁ nancially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations and spark debate. www.wellcome.ac.uk ambika P3 Ambika P3 is the University of Westminster’s space for contemporary art and architecture, presenting a public programme of solo and group exhibitions, education projects, talks and events. Dedicated to innovation, experimentation and learning, the programme has been conceived as a laboratory and meeting place for practitioners, industry and academia. The Director is Professor Katharine Heron the Curator is Dr Michael Mazière. Past exhibitions at Ambika P3 include ADAPTr (2016), Chantal Akerman’s NOW (2016), Potential Architecture (Alexander Brodsky, Sean Grifﬁ ths, Joar Nango and Apolonija Šuštersic) (2015), Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Out of Ice (2014), Victor Burgin’s A Sense of Place (2013), Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Happiest Man (2013), David Hall’s End Piece… (2012) and Anthony’s McCall’s Vertical Works (2011). Ambika P3 also hosts external cultural events and organisations including the London Contemporary Music Festival (2015) and the Royal Academy of Music (2016).Exhibited WorksJasmina Cibic, Unforseen Foreseens Federico Díaz, BIG LIGHT Space of Augmented SuggestionLynn Hershman Leeson, Real-Fiction Botnik and Venus of the AnthropocineRémy Markowitsch, The Casebooks Calf Lindsay Seers, Mental Metal  Tunga, Me, You and the MoonVisitor informationAmbika P3Address: 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LSClosed Mondays except Easter Monday. Admission free Opening hours: Tues–Fri, 11am – 7pm, Sat–Sun, 12pm – 6pmAdmission: FreeNearest Tube: Baker Street+44 (0)20 7911 5876p3.exhibitions@wmin.ac.ukwww.p3exhibitions.comCASEBOOKS is funded by a Wellcome Trust Provision for Public Engagement, produced in partnership with the University of Cambridge and Ambika P3, and supported by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Image overleafTunga Eu, Você e a Lua (Me, You and the Moon). 2015. Photo: Gabi Carrera 17 March – 23 April 2017Ambika P3, University of Westminster, LondonPrivate View: 6.30 – 8.30 Thursday 16 MarchCASEBOOKSSix contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archiveJasmina Cibic Federico Díaz Lynn Hershman Leeson Rémy Markowitsch Lindsay Seers TungaFederico Díaz, BIG LIGHT, 2016, Photo: Václav Jirásek Lynn Hershman Leeson, Venus of The Anthropocine, 2017 Jasmina Cibic, Building a Long Passageway. 2013. Photo: M. PaternosterRémy Markowitsch, “… have you seen my Alps?”, 2013. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin Leipzig. Photo: die Mobiliar Collection SwitzerlandTunga Eu, Você e a Lua (Me, You and the Moon). 2015. Photo: Gabi CarreraLindsay Seers, Mental Metal, 2017Ambika P3 and the Casebooks Project at the University of Cambridge present CASEBOOKS, a major exhibition engaging with one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history.International contemporary artists Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers and Tunga bring a diverse and radical range of practices to bear on the work of the Casebooks Project, which is editing the manuscripts of two seventeenth-century English astrologer-physicians, Simon Forman and his protégé Richard Napier. The manuscripts document some 80,000 medical consultations, and are testament to the preoccupations of patients with questions of health, disease, fertility, stability and their place within wider natural and supernatural schemes.CASEBOOKS presents six new works spanning sculpture, video and audio installation, live performance, robotics and artiﬁ cial intelligence. The Casebooks Project worked closely with the artists to establish resonances between the artists’ own work and historically acute questions about the nature of the casebooks, the kind of medical practice they represented and their signiﬁ cance for our understanding of medicine and natural knowledge. Ambika P3 engaged in a curatorial dialogue with each artist to encourage both an encounter with its vast post industrial space and the use of an original and complementary ecology of media. Jasmina Cibic’s new work, Unforseen Foreseens, is a site-speciﬁ c 12m long corridor installation fusing sculpture and performance, and alluding to the relationships between astrology, power and architecture. Federico Díaz is presenting a trade fair booth of a ﬁ ctional initiative BIG LIGHT, offering a glimpse into a possible future of merging biological and technological scientiﬁ c progress with social changes through augmented techno-shamanistic rituals. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Real-Fiction Botnik is a 3D holographic Artiﬁ cial Intelligence bot with a brain shaped by seventeenth-century astrological consultations, who is able to offer on-the-spot personal predictions. The Casebooks Calf by Rémy Markowitsch is a large-scale sculpture of a calf made of the same calfskin as the bindings of the casebooks, and from which emanate readings selected from the original seventeenth-century consultations. Lindsay Seers’ work Mental Metal considers, through Simon Forman’s writings, how elements of contemporary life have passed beyond causal, materialist/mechanistic Newtonian concepts to quantum speculations that have a hint of the supernatural about them. Following a method of correspondences as Forman did in his astral cosmology, Seers’ work is also shaped by afﬁ nities and Neoplatonic ideals of uniﬁ cation. Me, You and the Moon, a recent work chosen for the exhibition by the late artist Tunga, is a monolithic sculptural constellation of clay, rock and organic materials symbolising alchemy, astrology and the senses. about the ExhibitionCASEBOOKS is a collaboration between the Casebooks Project, Ambika P3 and the artists. CASEBOOKS is curated by Dr Michael Mazière, Reader at the Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster. The Casebooks side of the collaboration has been led by Dr Lauren Kassell, Director of the Casebooks Project and Reader in History of Science and Medicine and Dr Natalie Kaoukji, Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Artists were chosen by a Curatorial Advisory Committee: Alanna Heiss (Chair), Professor Katharine Heron, Dr Natalie Kaoukji, Dr Lauren Kassell, Dr Michael Mazière, Sam Thorne and David Thorp. The exhibition brings together Ambika P3’s mission as an experimental art space with the Casebooks Project’s engagement framework, a programme of work that experiments with means of communicating the nature of the casebooks and gauges responses to recalibrate how to digitally represent this extraordinary archive.the artists Jasmina Cibic is a UK based Slovenian artist who represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale, and was the winner of the MAC International Ulster Bank Art Prize 2016. She works in performance, installation and ﬁ lm, employing a range of activity, media and theatrical tactics to redeﬁ ne or reconsider a speciﬁ c ideological formation and its framing devices such as art and architecture. www.jasminacibic.org Federico Díaz is a visual activist of Czech-Argentinean descent who lives and works in Prague. He exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale, presented Geometric Death Frequency-141 at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2010-2012) and received the Premio Internazionale Lorenzo il Magniﬁ co for digital media at the Florence Biennale in 2007. His work is typiﬁ ed by the language of algorithmically-generated and systems art using media and technologies as a socio-political catalyst of social change. www.federicodiaz.net Artist and ﬁ lmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson is acclaimed for the pioneering use of new technologies through which she deals with issues such as identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, the interface between human and machine, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Hershman Leeson is a recipient of the d.velop digital art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Grand Prize, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the 2016 USA Smith Fellow in Media. www.lynnhershman.com Rémy Markowitsch is a Berlin and Lucerne based Swiss artist whose works examine diverse themes including literature and research, expeditions and discoveries, the appropriation of the foreign, colonialism, and the passion of collecting and addiction. They also reﬂ ect the use of different media including photography, books, video and language. He has exhibited at Kunstmuseum Luzern, GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Arts, London and recently at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. www.markowitsch.orgLindsay Seers lives on the Isle of Sheppey. Her video installations place ﬁ lmic imagery in sculptural settings, merging the spectral with the physical — cinema with theatre. Viewers enter her emotional/political landscapes to make their own associations in the dense ﬂ ow of dual screen images. The visitor becomes an implicated participant within the unfolding stories, which interweave grand historical narratives with intimate details of individuals’ biographies. In 2010 Seers was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, and in 2009 she won the Jarman Award. She has exhibited her large-scale works internationally including Venice Biennale; Kiasma (Finland); MONA (Tasmania); Centre of Contemporary Art (Poland); National Gallery of Denmark (SMK); Bonniers Konsthall (Sweden); Tate Triennial and Hayward Gallery (UK). www.lindsayseers.infoTunga was one of the leading Brazilian artists of his generation. His principal media of sculpture, installation and performance are customarily presented as an integrated body of work that convey new meanings to familiar objects. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2015, Luhring Augustine exhibited important early works by Tunga in a solo presentation at Frieze Masters and Frieze Live in London. www.luhringaugustine.com talks and Events (Times TBA)friday 17 march: Artists and Curator Seminar chaired by Lauren Kassell.Wednesday 22 march: CASEBOOKS Curator Michael Mazière gives a talk in the exhibition.Wednesday 29 march: Artist Jasmina Cibic discusses her work.Wednesday 5 april: Olivia Laing and Lauren Kassell lead a tour of CASEBOOKS followed by a discussion and drinks.Wednesday 12 april: Lauren Kassell talks about the Casebooks Project.Casebooks ClinicsWednesday, 22 march, 4–6pmsaturday, 8 april, 2–4pmLauren Kassell and the Casebooks Editors work with participants to read speciﬁ c cases and understand the consultations they record. Participants should bring a laptop and a brief list of cases of interest. To secure a place, please contact p3.exhibitions@wmin.ac.ukthe Casebooks Project A casebook is a written collection of cases, typically recorded in a series, day by day. Simon Forman’s and Richard Napier’s casebooks are the artefactual remains of thousands of encounters between the astrologer-physicians and their patients, sequenced across four decades. From the 1550s, other doctors wrote casebooks, but Forman’s and Napier’s are the largest surviving set from this period. The material they recorded was determined by the nature of astrological medicine: the question asked, the time at which it was asked, a chart of the planetary positions, and the physician’s judgement. The Casebooks Project is based in the Department of History and Philosophy of A page from one of Richard Napier’s casebooks. MS Ashmole 228, f. 204r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries.17 March – 23 April 2017CASEBOOKSSix contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archiveJasmina Cibic Federico Díaz Lynn Hershman Leeson Rémy Markowitsch Lindsay Seers TungaVisitor informationAmbika P3, University of Westminster35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LSNearest Tube: Baker StreetOpening Hours: Daily except MondaysTue – Fri, 11am – 7pm. Sat – Sun, 12pm – 6pm Admission free+44 (0)20 7911 5876 p3exhibitions.com

CASEBOOKS - Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive

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CASEBOOKS - Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive

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