Sunil Gupta, Songs of Deliverance Part I, 2022, Installation view at St. Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Commissioned by Studio Voltaire and Imperial Health Charity, Image Zoë Maxwell
Imperial Health Charity is pleased to present a new body of work by leading international artist Sunil Gupta.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta maintains a visionary approach to photography through bodies of work which are pioneering in their social commentary and approach to matters of identity, family, and migration. Subversive, personal and political, his work has done much to raise awareness about the struggles and modes of intimacy that permeate queer life in the modern world.
For this new commission, Gupta spent a year working in residence with two Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust services: the gender affirmation surgery service, that was based at Charing Cross Hospital until recently, and the adult HIV clinic at St Mary’s Hospital.
Sunil Gupta, Untitled (from Songs of Deliverance), 2022. Commissioned by Studio Voltaire and Imperial Health Charity. Image courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery. © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2022.
The photographs presented in this exhibition are the result of this residency. Recruited via an open invitation, nurses, doctors and patients were invited to collaborate and spend time with Gupta. Necessarily, many of these dialogues took place online while Gupta met others in their own familiar and community spaces: a church yard, the high street, parks, rivers, bars or grocery stores.
The resulting series of large–scale photographic works presents moving portrayals of his collaborators' lives, their experiences of receiving care and the relationships and transformations that occur in the process. Accompanying texts inspired by the work of artist Ken Lum—some fictional, some personal—explore family, community, stigma, and the lived realities of individuals who access these vital services.
Sunil Gupta, Untitled (from Songs of Deliverance), 2022. Commissioned by Studio Voltaire and Imperial Health Charity. Image courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery. © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2022.
Gupta has explored healthcare as a part of queer experience since the 1990s. His From Here to Eternity (1999) series was in part a response to the HIV epidemic, documenting his own treatments for the illness since a diagnosis in 1995, and the response of his own community and family. With tenderness and insight, Songs of Deliverance explores how public health systems shape private modes of belonging.
Songs of Deliverance, Part I will first be shown in the Cambridge Wing at St Mary’s Hospital. Part II will be exhibited in the main foyer of Charing Cross Hospital. Both bodies of work will then be displayed together at Hammersmith Hospital later in the year.
This is a collaboration between Imperial Health Charity and Studio Voltaire, one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit arts organisations, and has received additional funding from Arts Council England.