Superflex’s Conceptual Hospital Exhibition Gets Put to Life-Saving Use – in a Syrian Operating Room

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.”

 

 

Read the whole article by Brian Boucher on www.artnet.com.