Superflex’s Conceptual Hospital Exhibition Gets Put to Life-Saving Use—in a Syrian Operating Room by Brian Boucher
Victims of the raging civil war in Syria are undergoing surgery assisted by a work of conceptual art.
A hospital in the western Syrian city of Salamiyah is playing host to a unique kind of contemporary art exhibition. The three-man Danish art collective Superflex—Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen, and Bjørnsterne Christiansen—has sent a few pieces of top-notch surgical equipment to the city for the second iteration of a project ongoing since last year. The equipment will now be used to treat victims of the country’s bloody civil war.
In February, the hospital table, along with a surgical lamp and associated equipment, went on view as a single art piece at Galerie von Bartha in S-chanf, in the east of Switzerland. The artists consider the unnamed purchaser’s act of buying the table a form of art collecting, even though the buyers never take possession. The artists refer to the piece as a “readymade upside-down.”
“We want to challenge collecting itself,” Christiansen told artnet News in 2016. “Do you have to have the object, or can it be just as valuable to you that it be activated somewhere else?” The buyer gets a certificate of authenticity and a photograph of the installation.
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