Flare-Up was the first institutional exhibition in London to bring together UK-based and international visual artists whose work engages with the poetics and aesthetics of illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness. Presenting work by nineteen artists across Goldsmiths CCA, the exhibition brought together sculpture, installation, painting, film, poetry, music and performance as tools of expression and activism.

A flare-up refers to the fluctuating intensification of symptoms associated with chronic conditions; in music, a flare is a surge in volume or energy – an escalation that can also be celebratory. The exhibition drew on this affective quality, presenting works that use light, sound and water to engage with transcendence, mourning and joy. Many works addressed the daily rituals of care – or survival – alongside the labour of access. They also attended to the spiritual and redemptive, whether through hope placed in a medical system where much remains unexplained, or through the bodily and emotional intensities of pain, exclusion and alienation, intercut with intimacy and pleasure.

Built in 1898 as a washhouse, the CCA formed part of a civic architecture designed to address health and sanitation in a rapidly urbanising area. Ideas of public health, and the structural conditions that govern illness, were presented in a new commission by Avril Corroon that extended her project GOT DAMP (2023), which examines substandard housing conditions in London and Dublin and collective resistance to landlord neglect. The work used dehumidifier water collected from homes affected by damp as part of an installation and performance that considered the intersection of poverty and health.

State intervention and the expanding authority of medicine and psychology remained materially present in the glazed tiles and exposed pipes that once channelled water to the baths and laundries of the CCA. This architecture connected to Jesse Darling’s three-panel altarpiece, The Cleansing of the Temple (Luke 19:46) (2024), which was made from generic white bathroom tiles smeared with dirt, drawing on religious narratives of purification and fears of contagion.

Water recurred across the works of Leah Clements, Lizzy Rose, Jjjjjerome Ellis, and RA Walden as a medium that signaled fluidity and transformation, in resistance to binary distinctions such as well/unwell, and human/non-human. A major new commission by Leah Clements, titled Pure Joy took the form of a sound installation recounting a near-death experience that resisted scientific explanation. Relayed beneath a suspended tarpaulin filled with water, through which rays of light refract, it staged an encounter that oscillates between otherworldly states.

A flare is also a burst of light – a warning, a signal for help, or an illumination of what has been previously hidden. Flare-Up foregrounded how artistic practices generate sites of collectivity and resistance, countering the socially dispossessing effects of ableism and austerity. Institutions for education, healthcare or welfare regulate bodies and determine eligibility, competence, and capacity. Bella Milroy’s Violence in the Form of Stationery (2018) was one in a series of drawings and poems on brown envelopes – known for containing life-altering decisions from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – foregrounding the violence embedded in the materiality of this correspondence.

Across the works of Christine Sun Kim, JJJJJerome Ellis and Bella Milroy, language operated both as an instrument of state control and as a site of invention. Disfluency, the stammer, silence, mistranslation and creative captioning became generative strategies using language. In Sun Kim’s Close Readings (2015), sound was rendered visual, challenging normative assumptions about hearing and communication. In Ellis’s work, rhythmic disruption reorganised temporality itself; the gaps and spaces in between were where imagination flared and Black experience resided. These artworks complexified reductive representations of disability that reinforce structural injustice. Access was used creatively, not just as a formal device to reduce barriers to diverse groups, but as a conceptual method intrinsic to the work; for example, the captions used in Sun Kim’s work not only showed the richness of this medium if used creatively, but also overwhelmed the viewer with too much information, rendering it inaccessible to all.

The exhibition attended to the reclamation of crip identity – the strategic reappropriation of a pejorative term to forge political agency, collectivity and pride. Influenced by queer and feminist thought, “crip” operated here as a critical framework through which some artists aligned their work. Flare-Up did not impose a singular definition; rather, it presented multiplicity, contradiction and interdependency.

Several works engaged with crip time, the concept describing how illness and disability bend and distort temporal experience through symptoms, medication, exhaustion or enforced rest. Crip time also marks the labour required to undertake tasks and the energy consumed by access needs. The necessity of slowing down became a critique of capitalist imperatives of productivity. RA Walden’s installation Crip Ecologies (2018-ongoing) folded temporal distortion into non-human relations: organic materials were displayed in glass jars gathered within the limits of the artist’s bodily range on a given day, making pace and capacity integral to the work’s form. Similarly, Abi Palmer’s sculpture Chic Slug (2025) humorously celebrated post-human, queer and slower temporalities.

Flare-Up situated contemporary British practices in dialogue with international contexts and with earlier movements, including the enduring influence of HIV/AIDS art and activism. Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Derek Jarman traced such intergenerational continuities. This lineage was most explicit in Benoît Piéron’s Pillbox Dungeness Seed Bomb (2018), a chromatic pill organiser containing capsules filled with seeds from plants at Prospect Cottage – Jarman’s final refuge-garden in Dungeness, Kent. The seismic impact of this legacy has been foundational in the formation of crip communities and artistic strategies, drawing on queer approaches to abstraction and opacity as forms of crip aesthetics.

Networks of mutual support between artists working in the UK and internationally have been central to sustaining practices and catalysing institutional change. Direct and indirect references circulated across the exhibition; Jamila Prowse’s film Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene (2025) drew on Donald Rodney’s hospital footage while paying homage to the legacy of artist and activist Lizzy Rose. Artist-led developments – including the use of access riders and expanded attentiveness to exhibition accessibility – functioned here as structural interventions, confronting the hard edge of ableist capitalism and its prioritisation of productive bodies.

The flare is not a singular event. It is a condition of intensification. It names the escalation of symptoms, the flash of illumination, the surge of sound. It marks rupture and gathering simultaneously. Across the CCA’s tiled surfaces and exposed pipes – remnants of earlier regimes of hygiene and control – artists assembled other infrastructures: of care, of memory and of resistance.

PRESS

Flare-Up, Amanda Cachia, Art Monthly, September 2026 (print)

Access as Medium: "Flare Up" Highlights Arts of Illness and Disability, Amanda Cachia, ArtForum, August 2026

Flare Up: a brief and bright burst or the start of an art-world reckoning?, Nathalie Boobis, Disability Arts Online, August 2026 (online)

Notes on a Crip Exhibition, Alice Hattrick, ArtReview, August 2026 (online)

Flare-up, studio international, August 2026 (online)

On Illness and Disability in Contemporary Art, Daisy Lafarge, Frieze, June 2026 (online and in print)

This Exhibition Rethinks the Aesthetics of Illness and Disability, Amie Corry, Another Magazine, May 2026 (online)