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