Lucy Beech: Body Revenue

Body Revenue brings together a number of video works by British artist Lucy Beech (including a video produced together with her collaborator Edward Thomasson). The screening is presented as a public program alongside the group show Healing 2.0 curated by Tereza Jindrová. 

This selection of Beech’s video works explores the commercialisation of feeling; the agency of reproductive relations and experiences of the body that fall out of dominant clinical narratives. The protagonists in these works operate like cyphers; as outsiders, they bear witness to different social systems whilst learning that under pressure the marginal groups and alternative communities they observe and eventually become part of, hold internal tensions and hierarchies that are vulnerable to exploitation.

The screening further addresses a number of issues explored in Healing 2.0 including the role of technology and non-humans in medicine; collectivity; healing and self diagnosis in order to extend the exhibitions central theme of health and illness by including wider social, psychological and economical contexts. 
 

Lucy Beech (1985, UK) lives and works in London and Berlin.

Reproductive Exile explores the agency of reproductive relations focusing on female labour, visibility and the global flow of bodily revenue streams. The film follows a woman engaging in cross-border, assisted reproduction. Within this process she is confronted with a constellation of invisible female bodies; human and non-human that work, care and provide for her reproductive journey. From anonymous urine donors providing hormones purified from their bodily waste; to intended parents; their brokers and surrogate hosts, in Reproductive Exile the protagonist comes to terms with how her journey is both facilitated by and impacts an invisible community of different bodies.

Pharmakon explores the conflation between care and entrepreneurialism; focusing on the relationship between health anxiety and self diagnosis in an era of mass communication. The founder of the video’s central female community is part advocate for the network of displaced sufferers in search of legitimation and part entrepreneur in the business of the body; managing pain into a product and organising experiences of illness that fall out of dominant clinical narratives. The community suffer from a unknown condition which is manifest as the sensation that the body is being colonised; host to unknown organisms living on, in, or under the surface of the skin. This community exist in gap between an expectation of illness and how it actually manifests.

7 Year Itch is produced by Beech alongside her collaborator Edward thomasson. The video records a performance involving the live construction of sound within a controlled therapeutic environment. This work is part of an ongoing exploration of what happens when language fails as a mode of communication and people are left to use their bodies collectively as a means of transformation.

More info: 
Reproductive Exile, 30 min, 4K video with 5.1 surround sound, 2018
7 Year Itch, 4 min HD video with sound, 2015
Pharmakon, 20 mins, 4K video with 5.1 surround sound, 2016

The screening is the part of MeetFactory Soirée and it is free.