Art Exhibition: More-Than-Human Healthcare

A new exhibition by artist Helen Knowles opens at Northumbria University's Gallery North from Tuesday 1 April.

More-Than-Human Healthcare facilitates a multitude of voices – non-human, more-than-human and human. It pays serious attention to an ephemeral constellation of entities encountered through the contemporary tools of psychedelic medicine, the development of the AI doctor and plant intelligences.

Employing a participatory approach, Knowles has produced a trilogy of artworks which includes two artist films, Indexed Beings and Caring Code, and an immersive installation called Trust the Medicine, shown together for the first time.

Centred on the agency of these caring entities and how this agency is culturally and cosmologically underscored, the exhibition investigates a broad spectrum of differing practices, locations and relationships.

These are: psychedelic entities met during psychedelic experiences, as recounted by participants in psychedelic integration groups led by researchers at King’s College, London (KCL), plant beings of the forest with whom the indigenous Inga, Siona, Kamëntsá and Cofán communities, in Putumayo, Colombia, work to heal one another, and AI models being trained by researchers to cooperate with or usurp medical professionals in their healthcare practices, at the London AI lab, (KCL).

Knowles’s use of performance and film focuses on the relational and generative qualities of discourse. Adopting a decolonial agenda, the project facilitates the creation of a pluriversal, techno-diverse arena that engages all parties, to unpick cosmologies embedded in these ancient and novel tools of care.

Whilst indigenous cultures have long worked with plant spirits and developed frameworks to manage and reciprocally interact with such agents within a relational architecture, how do scientists frame and understand a psychedelic entity which emanates from a synthesized chemical drug created in a laboratory? Similarly, how do botanists view their collection of plant specimens and how do AI researchers regard algorithmic entities which we devolve power to, to take decisions on care (AI doctor)?

This project takes a practical approach to the challenge set by philosopher Yuk Hui and anthropologist Arturo Escobar: to contest the dominance of profit-driven thinking - a capitalist cosmology - that underpins an extractive agenda in the shaping of technology.

Through the medium of film, Knowles has developed a cosmotechnic (Hui, 2016) film aesthetic that decentres the human and accentuates the voice, appearance, and imagination of the non or more-than-human, as well as the relationships of care they share with fellow human kin.

The challenge is to think beyond the natural or artificial in an expansive and inclusive manner which looks three ways – between the tools, the entities and our human presence in the world.

The exhibition space is a hiatus to encourage generative critique and new ways of thinking about more-than-human or non-human relationships of care—an area that is currently under-researched but fundamental for understanding how those engaging with such tools might work with and trust these agents, especially since we can no longer refute their impact on our lives.

A private viewing of the exhibition takes place on Tuesday 1 April, from 6pm to 8.30pm. During this event the film Indexed Beings is being screened at 6 pm, 6.45pm 7.30pm.

The exhibition is then open to the public from Wednesday 2 April to Wednesday 16 April at Gallery North, Sandyford Building. Sandyford Road, Northumbria University NE1 8QE

Opening days/time:

• Monday to Friday: 2pm to 4pm (Monday 14th 2pm – 4pm)
• Saturday: 10am to 2pm Sat

For all interviews and press-related enquiries contact: helen.r.knowles@northumbria.ac.uk

Click here to read an interview with the artist Helen Knowles, in which she discusses the regenerative power of art and nature with fungi expert Merlin Sheldrake