Hygiene: the Art of Public Health

This exhibition was one of a series of cross-disciplinary art/science interventions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in which a critical dialogue is set up between artists and scientists. The project is the outcome of my collaboration with environmental scientist Tony Fletcher.

The project employs art to mediate within a space devoted to the study of public health, and to question the assumptions underpinning the word ‘hygiene’ through the art works’ research into obsession, control, disease, disgust, taboo, infection, eugenics, purity and pollution. In these artworks the ambiguities evident within the field of hygiene are developed and tested and discussed.

Pam Skelton

Research Interests

Spatial and temporal displacement, the expanded archive, memory, history, conflict and space that explores the interface of private and public memory in still and moving media.

Current Research

Current research activity includes a Speculative AHRC project ‘Archive of Exile’ with Cultural Geographer Jessica Dubow. This project explores the theoretical and creative possibilities of two apparently contradictory concepts: the exile (understood as a mode of thought informed by radical spatial mobility) and the archive (figured as a key institution of a national or territorial political imaginary. Ongoing research includes ‘Dwelling in the Space of Conspiracy’ an extended examination that has emerged from the recent AHRC project ‘Conspiracy Dwellings, the Stasi Ring Unveiled’. This project began with a study of the topography of surveillance in a former East German city and extends its parameters by investigating the ethical and cultural boundaries that impact on political archives and citizens. I am co-editor with Outi Remes on the book forthcoming Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, in 2010. Currently, I am researching a new project that focuses on an Anglo Soviet archive and asks how can it contribute to our understanding and interpretation of ideas and culture and prevent certain histories from being marginalised or lost.