‘Rethinking Wellbeing Through Art‘ brings together an interdisciplinary panel of leading scholars from fine art, social science, moral philosophy, and the digital humanities to explore how artists critique workplace wellness initiatives in organisational and work-related contexts by evaluating wellbeing as a multifaceted question. Organised by Dr Simon Willems (University of Reading) in partnership with University of Greenwich Galleries, the symposium draws on Dr Willems postdoctoral research project as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. The event will run alongside the group exhibition Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, which will take place in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery (University of Greenwich), featuring artworks curated from the research.
Before the 2020 pandemic, a spate of exhibitions thematising mental and physical health placed renewed emphasis on personal and collective wellbeing. Key survey-exhibitions such as Group Therapy at Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2018-19) and Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy at Somerset House, London (2020) presented work that looked beyond the neoliberal obsession with individual wellness towards alternative solutions that take account of structural inequalities and social injustice. This renewed focus on wellness and self-care was not only felt in curatorship, but also in public programmes, as museums hosted yoga and meditation classes, mindfulness workshops and other therapeutic activities to cushion the stresses of contemporary life. Yet what these developments lacked, whilst raising the question of wellbeing, was a deeper appraisal: both of the political structures instrumentalising wellness narratives in the production of art and its institutions, as well as a focus on how narratives of wellness play out specifically in the workplace.
This symposium thus considers how the ‘therapeutic turn’ (Madsen 2014) in organisations and the ‘turn to health’ (Muñoz 2020) in artistic production raises the stakes in how we respond to and recognise workplace wellbeing as a political and ethical question. In locating this question within a cross-disciplinary debate that takes account of its different aspects and the increasing role of technology, the symposium hopes to elicit new perspectives in rethinking wellbeing outside of the neoliberal imperative to align workplace wellbeing with the responsibility of the individual.