Excerpts (solo exhibition)
September 12 - November 1, 2019
Opening Reception & Artist Talk: Thursday, September 12, 5-7pm
Hollister Gallery at the Sorenson Center for the Arts
Babson College
231 Forest Street, Wellesley, MA
Free and open to the public. *Reservation is encouraged.
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Excerpts, a new iteration of Naoe Suzuki’s Artist-in-Residence projects at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, is an exploration of interconnectedness between knowledge and belief in medical science. Suzuki incorporates magic spells from the Edwin Smith Papyrus, from 1,600 BC in Egypt, the earliest known medical papyrus to include prognosis. She extracts and sequences these archaic spells—indecipherable to the untrained eye—as formal visual elements, and invites viewers to read the unreadable. The artist traced the magic spells by hand, recalling the scribes’ handiwork in the papyrus, but used laser cutting to cut out these spells.
Suzuki contemplates our ancient convictions about medicine in a time when science, medicine, and technology are all accelerating at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. Bringing forth a forgotten treatise to the present, she asks us what is legitimate, what we may have lost, and what we still believe.
Watch the video about Broad Institute Artist-in-Residence.
