FLARE-UP at Goldsmiths CCA: Illness, Disability and Contemporary Art

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art opens FLARE-UP today, a major group exhibition bringing together artists whose work engages with illness, disability, neurodivergence, and Deafness. Running from 21 May to 16 August 2026, the exhibition positions the body not as a tidy subject to be explained, diagnosed, softened, or made palatable, but as a site of pressure, survival, access, pleasure, mourning, resistance, and change.

The title matters. A flare-up is usually understood through chronic illness: the sudden worsening or intensification of symptoms. It is the body becoming loud, often at the most inconvenient time, because bodies have famously poor respect for calendars. But the exhibition also connects the word to music, where a flare can mean a surge of volume or energy. That double meaning is important. This is not simply an exhibition about suffering. It is about intensity. It is about interruption. It is about the refusal of disabled, sick, neurodivergent, and Deaf experience to remain politely in the background.

Goldsmiths CCA describes FLARE-UP as the first institutional exhibition in London to bring together UK-based and international visual artists working with the poetics and aesthetics of illness, disability, neurodivergence, and Deafness. The show includes sculpture, installation, painting, film, poetry, music, and performance, presenting these forms not as passive documentation but as tools of expression and activism.

The artist list is substantial: Angela de la Cruz, Abi Palmer, Avril Corroon, Bella Milroy, Benoît Piéron, Carolyn Lazard, Christine Sun Kim, Constantina Zavitsanos, Derek Jarman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Freestylers, Jamila Prowse, Jesse Darling, JJJJJerome Ellis, Leah Clements, Lizzy Rose, Park McArthur, RA Walden, and Racheal Crowther. That range matters because illness and disability are not one aesthetic, one story, or one inspirational staircase for non-disabled audiences to clap at. Thank God. Nobody needs more pity theatre with wall text.

What makes FLARE-UP interesting is its attention to the everyday labour of care and access. The exhibition looks at survival as a daily practice: medication, rest, dependency, frustration, adaptation, and the constant negotiation between a body and a world that often pretends access is an optional extra. Many of the works also deal with transcendence, mourning, joy, exclusion, alienation, intimacy, and pleasure. In other words, this is not a flattened version of illness. It does not reduce the body to diagnosis, damage, or “bravery.”

There is also a strong architectural and social context. Goldsmiths CCA’s building was originally constructed in 1898 as a washhouse, part of civic infrastructure connected to public health and sanitation. That history gives the exhibition an extra charge. Illness is not just private. Disability is not just individual. Health is shaped by housing, poverty, labour, environment, medical systems, public space, and institutional neglect. Avril Corroon’s new commission, extending her project GOT DAMP, directly addresses poor housing conditions in London and Dublin, connecting damp, architecture, landlord neglect, and collective resistance.

This is where the exhibition becomes sharper. FLARE-UP is not only about bodies that hurt, glitch, flare, sign, rest, or resist. It is also about the systems around those bodies. The gallery becomes a place where care is not sentimentalised. Access is not treated as charity. Illness is not turned into clean metaphor. Instead, the exhibition seems to ask what happens when the body refuses to behave like a neat object for culture to organise.

That question feels urgent now. Contemporary art still has an awkward habit of treating disability and illness as either personal tragedy or symbolic material. The sick body becomes “fragile.” The disabled body becomes “resilient.” The neurodivergent mind becomes “different.” The Deaf artist becomes “communicative.” These words are not always wrong, but they can become soft little cages. FLARE-UP appears to push against that, allowing opacity, anger, complexity, humour, contradiction, and desire to remain in the room.

The public programme strengthens that commitment. Goldsmiths CCA has scheduled relaxed viewings, a British Sign Language tour with Martin Glover, a tour with Dan Glass of ACT UP London, performances by Freestylers, and an online discussion on curatorial practice, disability studies, access, and cultural production. These events suggest that access is being treated as part of the exhibition’s structure, not a decorative footnote shoved at the bottom of the page like an embarrassed afterthought.

For artists working with the body, memory, trauma, identity, or digital presence, FLARE-UP offers a useful challenge. It asks how illness can be represented without being tidied up. It asks how disability can be visible without becoming spectacle. It asks how art can hold pain and joy in the same space without forcing one to justify the other.

The strongest thing about the exhibition’s premise is that it does not seem interested in making illness “beautiful” in the lazy sense. Instead, it treats flare-ups as aesthetic, political, social, and emotional events. A flare-up interrupts. It exposes. It demands adjustment. It changes the atmosphere. It reminds everyone that bodies are not obedient machines. Some bodies whisper. Some bodies roar. Some bodies flicker like warning lights in a building nobody bothered to maintain.

FLARE-UP matters because it does not ask illness, disability, neurodivergence, or Deafness to become easy viewing. It gives them space to be difficult, luminous, resistant, ordinary, funny, painful, and unresolved.

And frankly, that is where the work gets interesting. Not when the body is explained. When it refuses to be neatly displayed.

Sources for the FLARE-UP article 🔗

1. Goldsmiths CCA: FLARE-UP exhibition page
   https://goldsmithscca.art/exhibition/flare-up/
   Main source for exhibition dates, themes, artists, commissions, and curatorial framing.
2. Goldsmiths CCA: Current exhibitions / opening information
   https://goldsmithscca.art/
   Confirms FLARE-UP, dates, and gallery opening times.
3. Goldsmiths CCA: Events programme
   https://goldsmithscca.art/events/
   Useful for relaxed viewings, public talks, performances, access-related programming, and supporting events.
4. Goldsmiths CCA: BSL Tour of FLARE-UP with Martin Glover
   https://goldsmithscca.art/event/bsl-tour-of-flare-up-with-martin-glover/
   Source for the British Sign Language tour and access-related programming.
5. Goldsmiths CCA: FLARE-UP Tour with Dan Glass, ACT UP London
   https://goldsmithscca.art/event/flare-up-tour-with-dan-glass-act-up-london/
   Useful for the AIDS activism, Derek Jarman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and ACT UP London context.
6. Goldsmiths, University of London: FLARE-UP event listing
   https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=15942
   Confirms the exhibition as the first institutional exhibition in London bringing together artists engaging with illness, disability, neurodivergence, and Deafness.
7. Artforum Artguide: FLARE-UP at Goldsmiths CCA
   https://artguide.artforum.com/artguide/goldsmiths-centre-for-contemporary-art-16285
   External listing confirming dates and exhibition details.
8. HENI News: Goldsmiths CCA to Host FLARE-UP Exhibition Exploring Illness and Disability
   https://heni.com/news/article/goldsmiths-cca-to-host-flare-up-exhibition-exploring-illness-and-disability
   Good secondary source for overview, themes, and exhibition framing.
9. TACO!: GOT DAMP Exhibition by Avril Corroon
   https://taco.org.uk/GOT-DAMP-EXHIBITION
   Useful for background on Avril Corroon’s GOT DAMP project, damp housing, tenant experience, and public health context.
10. Project Arts Centre: GOT DAMP / PÚSCADH ANUAS, Avril Corroon
    https://projectartscentre.ie/events/got-damp-puscadh-anuas-avril-corroon/
    Good deeper source for Corroon’s housing, damp, cost of living, and community protest context.