Upcoming:
• Friday 24 January 2025. Screening, As You Were, The Bomb Factory Foundation, London.
Part of (Mis)Conceptions: Belief & Bodies Beyond Fertility project by Dr Isabel Davis and Anna Burel, National History Museum, London.
• ‘Birth knowledge and institutional experiences: Lyndsay Mann’s As You Were’, Camilla Mørk Røstvik.
Essay by Dr Røstvik for Art & the Critical Medical Humanities volume, Bloomsbury (2025). Edited by Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, Imogen Wilshire.
News:
• 2.30pm - 4.30pm, Sunday 1 December 2024. Carers at ‘Cancelled Culture: a weekend of platforming silenced voices’ Spore Initiative, Berlin.
Child-friendly, experimental space for carers looking for ways to attend particpatory and discursive events with their children - to think together about ways to organise a community of engagement, care and exchange.
• 21 September 2024. Sea Change Film Festival, Tiree, UK.
Screening of As You Were at Scotland’s only annual film festival dedicated to women in film. Produced by Screen Argyll, funded by Screen Scotland.
• 19-21 June 2024. Art & the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the Royal College of Art, London.
‘A three-day workshop fostering dialogue, creating connections and activating new entanglements between art-led practices and the critical medical humanities.’ Co-convened by Fiona Johnstone, Durham University; Allison Morehead, Queen’s University, Canada; Imogen Wilshire, Lincoln University; Gemma Blackshaw, RCA; and Alice Butler, RCA.
• 30 May 2024. Artist’s talk and presentation, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin - contemporary insights from historical objects, (midwifery and obstretrics / hebammenwesen und geburtshilfe).
With Prof. Dr. Birgit Nemec, Co-director of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Chair for the History of Medicine.
As You Were (2024) - new non-fiction moving image work
[50min, HD, single channel, stereo. Eng w/ closed captions. German subtitles available.]
Themes: Intimacy; Archive; Institutions; Women’s Healthcare; Professional identity.
How do our private experiences inform our professional selves that through our institutions impact the lives of others?
As You Were has its own webpage here>
Above Image: Listening Forward Symposium, IMPULS Festival, 2023.
Image credit: Helena Majewska
Plants, Humans, Institutions
IMPULS festival, Leipzig. 12-14 Okt 2023.
Plants, Humans, Institutions is a new performance lecture on Voice by artist filmmaker Lyndsay Mann. How do institutional agendas shape how we talk to each other and to ourselves? This presentation uses Botany as a framework to query representations of science, institutional histories, nativeness and the bodily experience of belonging. Commissioned by curator Julian Reiken.
Florilegium: A Gathering of Flowers
Exhibition review (excerpt) by Genevieve Fay
Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh 16 Oct - 13 Dec 2020.
“…The work of both Annalee Davis and Lyndsay Mann anchors the exhibition in something deeper, bringing the role of the Botanic Garden, the collection of plants, the colonial ecosystem at the heart of RBGE’s existence, into view. … Davis’ art works in dialogue with Lyndsay Mann’s A Desire for Organic Order (2016), a mesmerising film of 55 minutes which explores the RBGE’s Herbarium, where species of preserved plants are kept for study and research. Although most visitors won’t have time watch the film from start to finish, it’s a fascinating piece, which shines a light on the strangeness of it all: the meticulously categorised, catalogued, classified plants, sitting in row upon row of filing cabinets and box files, the collection expanding over the centuries as new species are found and brought to the RBGE, their final resting place.
Above image: A Desire For Organic Order, Lyndsay Mann (2016) [video still]
The violence surrounding these collections is examined at a distance, with the narrator’s voice dispassionately implying but never quite explaining what we know now, that far more care was given to these foreign plants than to the humans who lived alongside them. If you do have the chance to sit here a while, I’m sure it will make you see the exhibition, and the whole RBGE endeavour, in a slightly different light. You may not think you need this part of your world to be challenged, that you just want to enjoy the Botanics and not think too much about the difficult history and context. But it’s the ability of artists to show things you thought you knew in a new way, that is what makes them so vital to how we think about our past, present and future. That’s why we need the upper floor of the exhibition. We can’t just have a “gathering of flowers”, we need someone to tell us what they mean.” Link to full article