HOSPITAL ROOMS: Holding Space
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour

Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row, London, W1S 2ET

Hospital Rooms is an arts and mental health charity that transforms mental health hospitals with extraordinary creative programmes and artworks. The psychiatric wards they work in are complex sites. Charged with the care of people experiencing extreme distress and trauma, they navigate difficult ethical territory. Individuals lose their liberty and are detained in the name of safety; surfaces are wipe-clean, hard and cold to control infection; furniture is weighted, alarms sound and doors slam to limit incidents. In the most restrictive settings, belongings, keepsakes and comforts are all contraband. These modes of care can quickly translate to hostility and containment. 

This exhibition examines whether collectively, we could re-frame what it is to ‘hold’ a person during this time. These installations and events probe whether an environment can offer solace, relief and dignity. When so much is at stake, we wonder what spatial qualities can be dynamic, improvisational, tender, or sensorial? What conditions might actively nurture creative and participatory instincts?

Over the past year, Hospital Rooms has worked in solidarity with the NHS to envisage and realise this possibility. During 200 creative sessions with over 1,100 people with lived experience of mental health services and over 40 acclaimed artists, they have dreamt up new kinds of ‘holding spaces’ within and around psychiatric wards. They have seen people over weeks and months open up, pick up paint brushes, pencils, cameras, learn new techniques, and create novel and unexpected solutions. Through a process of building up, connecting, assembling, repurposing, handling and shaping, the energy, vitality and compassion of an extraordinary collection of people have been absorbed into the architecture of mental health hospitals across the country.

This exhibition forms part of a 3 year partnership between Hospital Rooms and Hauser & Wirth that aims to raise over £1 million to support their essential work across the UK.

Find out more: hospital-rooms.com
From 17th August 2023 to 12th September 2023

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