Flare-Up will be the first institutional exhibition in London to bring together UK-based and international visual artists whose work engages with the poetics and aesthetics of illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness. Presenting work by seventeen artists across Goldsmiths CCA, the exhibition brings together sculpture, installation, painting, film, poetry, music and performance as tools of expression and activism.

A flare-up refers to the fluctuating intensification of symptoms associated with chronic conditions; in music, a flare is a surge in volume or energy – an escalation that can also be celebratory. The exhibition draws on this affective quality, presenting works that use light, sound and water to engage with transcendence, mourning and joy. Many works address the daily rituals of care – or survival – alongside the labour of access. They also attend to the spiritual and redemptive, whether through hope placed in a medical system where much remains unexplained, or through the bodily and emotional intensities of pain, exclusion and alienation, intercut with intimacy and pleasure.