SERIES
Walk Back to Your Body
A person sleeping in a string tent

What does it mean to be in conversation with your body? Many social, cultural, and political conventions we live by today discipline how we experience our bodies. They are often defined by their productivity, utility, fitness, and so on, but rarely through vulnerability and reflection. Through this series of collaborations between artists and researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School, we ask you to consider the ways in which your body features (or, perhaps, does not feature?) in your daily lives, disrupting the automatized ways in which we navigate the world.

Social practice artist Peng Wu’s Daydream Chapel is a product of collaboration with neurologist and sleep researcher Dr. Michael Howell. Peng’s installation is dedicated to that spiritual and sacred experience that lies at the heart of basic human need: rest. In an increasingly restless and disconcerting world, Daydream Chapel invites viewers to lie down alongside a stranger and stop, if only for a moment, to go “off the clock” and engage in equal, sincere, and intimate conversations.

Anna Marie Shogren’s interactive installation Work/Lifelong Choreographies is inspired by her experiences as a dance artist and a caregiver. In collaboration with Kristine Talley of the School of Nursing, Anna’s improvisational movement practice invites viewers to experience the physical conditions of older adults. Wearable garments such as the Neuropathy Gloves and the Shoulder Impingement Shirt animate conversations about the realities of age and loss of vitality by provoking playful, tactile fascination with movement.

Alison Hiltner’s work produces tactile, physical surfaces through which one can experience the heartbeat. Hiltner collaborates with biotechnology researcher Dr. Brenda Ogle, neurophysiologist Dr. Paul Laizzo, and programmer Brian Hadyen to create an interface that allows participants to “hold” one another’s heartbeat. Viewers are invited to talk to Alison during her ‘office hours’ in the Target Studio, where she invites everyone to participate in the evolution of this work. How would you want to feel someone’s heart?

Yuko Taniguchi and her collaborator, psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Cullen, explore the impact of creative practices on the wellbeing of adolescents facing pressing mental health challenges. Her resultant poem, Walk Back To Your Body, also synthesizes her own experiences of collaboration with those of the other artists in the Art and Health program. Yuko’s piece hones in on the nature of the relationship forged between the bodily and the cerebral, as does the work by Peng, Anna, and Alison. Walk Back To Your Body is therefore the guiding sentiment of this program—and the title of this exhibition—which calls to bring us back into our bodies from all the places that our minds take us to.

Join us on December 5th for a conversation with the artists and their collaborators, Dean of the Medical School Dr. Jakub Tolar, the Vice Dean for Research of the Medical School Dr. Tim Schacker, and curator Boris Oicherman. Walk in, walk out, walk around, walk back.

 

Interested in speaking to the artists or collaborators directly?

Peng Wu

Nap Meetings: Thursdays, 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.

emailpengwu@gmail.com 

Instagram @pen9wu

 

Anna Marie Shogren

Performances: Wednesdays and Fridays, 12:00 – 4:00 p.m.

(exceptions: 9/25, 9/27, 10/16, 10/18, 11/29)

annamaries@gmail.com

Instagram @seiramanna

 

Alison Hiltner

Office Hours: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. until 12/11

Some times may vary, please contact Alison at alison.hiltner@gmail.com if you would like to confirm.

 

Yuko Taniguchi

tani0013@r.umn.edu

Creative Completion of Rest:  9/29, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m, 10/20, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m., 11/10, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

 

Boris Oicherman

boris@umn.edu

Office Hours: every other Wednesday, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Schedule an appointment here.

 

This project is generously supported by funds from the University of Minnesota Medical School.