SOCIOECONOMIC BODIES

Featuring work by Grey Ellis and Leena Joshi, this exhibition seeks to connect the physical body and a notion of a "socioeconomic body" via issues of chronic illness, alienation, gentrification and how these issues function within art spaces more broadly

Exhibited during Detroit Art Week 2019
Young Curators, New Ideas V

SOCIOECONOMIC BODIES features work by artist and cultural producer Grey Ellis and multidisciplinary artist Leena Joshi. The title for the exhibition SOCIOECONOMIC BODIES -- inspired by the text “Cognitarian Subjectivation” (2010) by Franco Bifo Berardi -- is the proposition that our bodies are affected via the nervous system by the socio-economic climate. Chronic illness and mental illness are specifically addressed in the exhibition as afflictions stemming from bi-products of accelerated Late Capitalism. The ways in which economies directly affect a city are embedded in the recent history of Detroit, similarly these effects are embodied in the experience of mental and chronic illness. The rapidly developing Corktown neighborhood that is supporting the exhibition, comes into the fold when considering art and culture acting as catalysts to gentrification. Raising the question: how does chronic illness and anxiety intersect with spaces of cultural production?