Mental Metal

Materials; three channel video installation (HD on brightsign media players), modified satellite dishes with curtain enclosure in red and black fabric, wireless audio (silent disco).

Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive

Artists: Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers, Tunga

Seers’ work ‘Mental Metal' considers, through Simon Forman's writings, how elements of contemporary life have passed beyond causal, materialist/mechanistic concepts to speculations that have a hint of the supernatural about them. Although calling down spirits and distilling alchemical potions has the semblance of pure superstition, the complex metaphysical philosophy of Neoplatonism, which was part of Forman's milieu, used a notion of affinities and correspondences that pass beyond simple causal relations–the implications of which are not without import and whose underlying desire was towards a unified and tolerant system of knowledge. The search for this unity and the relationship of one to the whole pervades this work as it did in Forman's astral cosmology.
Ambika P3 and the Casebooks Project at the University of Cambridge present Casebooks, a major exhibition engaging with one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. International contemporary artists Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers and Tunga bring a diverse and radical range of practices to bear on the work of the Casebooks Project, which is editing the manuscripts of two seventeenth-century English astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and his protégé Richard Napier. The manuscripts document some 80,000 medical consultations, and are testament to the preoccupations of patients with questions of health, disease, fertility, stability and their place within wider natural and supernatural schemes.

Funded by Wellcome and Cambridge University, Ambika P3, and supported by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.