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A Spoonful of Sugar helps the Medicine go down, 2018

Collages, texts, maps, cabinet of drawers, books, sweets 

Exhibited at Fortress Builders, Heritage Malta, Valletta, as part of Mahalla Festival, November, 2018

Curators: Thomas Büsch, Sabine Küper-Büsch

In what ways are our attitudes towards medicine and health similar to our political convictions? A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down invites viewers to open cabinet drawers and engage with textual fragments, medical illustrations and tongue-in-cheek references to Maltese politics in a new series of collages that links physical sickness to social malaise, medical prescriptions to electoral manifestos, the objectification of the patient’s body to the control of the mind in an ailing society, numbed by party politics. This ironic adaptation of the medieval notion of the body politic dissects modern society, putting patients under the care of politicians and converting a nation into a deranged clinic. Anatomical and surgical interventions, old maps and slogans are combined to form a heady cocktail that tells a desperate story about a world that seeks salvation in a prison of its own making.