Links
chaoyingrao.com
awadalla.info
How to Bury a Hospital: Listening for the Ghosts of a Glasgow Institution
How to Bury a Hospital: Listening for the Ghosts of a Glasgow Institution
In 1805, a Lock Hospital opened in Glasgow for the compulsory confinement and treatment of women and girls suspected of carrying ‘venereal diseases’, or sexually transmitted infections. Although the institution remained in operation in different forms until the mid-twentieth century, much of its history has disappeared from the landscape. Student accommodation now stands on the site where the hospital once confined women in the name of public health.
Out of Bounds is a developing film and artistic research project by Madi Awadalla and Chaoying Rao. Bringing together archival research, moving image, performance and lived knowledge, the project traces the Lock Hospital as a place where medicine, moral policing, gender and sexual labour became entangled. It asks how institutions presented as spaces of care also operated through punishment, surveillance and incarceration, and what survives when their buildings and histories have apparently vanished.
For Hard Labour, Madi and Chaoying will share material, discoveries and unresolved questions from the project so far. The event will move between the history of the Glasgow Lock Hospital, the process of researching an institution structured by silence and stigma, and the possibilities of making work about sex workers’ histories without reproducing the forms of scrutiny through which those histories were recorded. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with the audience.
ReadChaoying Rao aka Femme Castratrice is Glasgow-based visual artist, and whose creative practice explores the weaponisation of desire under patriarchy and western myth-making structures about the orient. Her research materialises in photography, live art, moving image, sculpture, and installation. She found herself working in strip clubs from the age of seventeen. It became the place where her movement and performance practice were born and, in the many years that followed, honed. It was the prompt for her interest in how power is negotiated through the body, through images of the body, and in the histories and legacies of racial fetishisation. Often using humour as a tool to disarm and charm the viewer, her work utilises the visual tropes of misogyny, abject femininity, and the grotesque to play with that fine line between attraction and repulsion.
Madi Awadalla is an Egypt-born writer, historian and transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Working across film, performance, text and archival research, they bring historical inquiry into conversation with questions of intimate life, examining how medicine, borders, surveillance and empire shape bodies, relationships and everyday experience.
Their practice is shaped by a career spanning sexual health, community work, activism and cultural production. Bringing research into conversation with lived knowledge, their work moves between institutional critique and collective care. Their short film Queer Exile has screened internationally and received multiple awards.
Access
Info on Main Event Page
See the Hard Labour Access page for more details on the general access for the events and the venue. This event has no additional specific access provided.
