On November 30 at 7 p.m. the fifth, final international discussion of the educational program cycle of the VII Moscow International Biennale of Young Art will be streaming.  

Participants: historian, doctor of philosophy Anna Mazanik (Austria), Javi Karel (Great Britain), Valeria Kononchuk (Russia).

Illness and morbidity unveil a paradox of the letter and life experience, poverty and wealth, visible and invisible. In the final meeting from the cycle of discussions "Salon of Rejected Categories", philosopher Havi Carel, medical historian Anna Mazanik and cultural researcher Lera Kononchuk will discuss a topic that has unexpectedly become the central theme of 2020.

Despite the strict statistical classification of illnesses, an individual anamnesis can be radically different from systematics. As philosophers believe, medical practice produces several versions of bodies: both the patient's real body and the protocol diagnosis itself. And the physiological description often comes into conflict with the patient's subjective phenomenological experience.

Since all people, regardless of their status, are susceptible to illness, we are used to seeing it as a great equalizer. Being ill reduces a person to his "bare life" or biology — the immune system, genetic predisposition, etc. However, in reality, access to quality health care and drugs, as well as access to certain lifestyles, reduces both the risk of illness and increases the chances of rapid recovery. Historically, illness was perceived in the mass consciousness as the fate of the poor or as a curse for the rich; some illnesses received a public response, others — bypassed.

Finally, illness can be viewed as a manifestation of the philosophical difference between the virtual and the actual. Some diseases have a vivid visual manifestation and therefore became an object of art, falling under the category of "uncanny", "traumatic" and "abject". Others, on the contrary, are asymptomatic or undetectable and require different ways of representation.

Participation is free.

Anna Mazanik (born 1986) is a historian and an assistant professor at the Department of the Ethics and History of Medicine, Medical University of Vienna. She has graduated from Moscow State University and earned her MA and PhD in comparative history from Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). She has had resident fellowships at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2016-2018 she curated Russian-language collections at the Open Society Archives and in 2019-2020 directed the doctoral program in environment and society at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich. Her research interests include modern and contemporary history of science and medicine, in particular, history of hygiene, bacteriology and virology, sanitary infrastructure, the environmental aspects of medicine and public health as well as multispecies relations in the context of medicine. In 2015 she defended a doctoral dissertation on the history of public health in Moscow that should come out as a book Germs of Change: Public Health and Environment in Imperial Moscow (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Havi Carel (b. 1970) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, the Life of Breath. She was awarded the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018 for this work. Her third monograph, Phenomenology of Illness, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. She was selected as a ‘Best of Bristol’ lecturer in 2016. Havi is the author of Illness (2008, 2013, 2018), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006). She is the co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010), and of What Philosophy Is (2004).

Lera Kononchuk (b. 1990) - cultural critic, art critic, lives and works in Moscow. One of the founders of the web zine about contemporary art and philosophy SPECTATE. Independent curator of the philosophical project "Practical affectology".