What are the odds?

What are the odds? Ikon Creative Health is an off-site exhibition by Ikon at the Library of Birmingham, which explores the role of art in supporting health and care systems. It presents creative health not only as an intervention, but as a way of questioning, shaping and understanding the conditions we live in. The exhibition includes work by RAAD researcher Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora and postgraduate researcher Sally Butcher. It runs from 21 January to 27 June.

Bringing together three years of Ikon’s collaborative research with visual artists, academic and charity partners into an immersive display, the exhibition reflects a range of lived experience from diversity in infant feeding to ageing and dying well. Accompanied by a 1970s-style graphic identity, designed by Birmingham based artist Foka Wolf, What are the odds? plays on a ‘game of life’ TV show aesthetic, simulating a journey through the different institutions that define a life course. 

For Green Spaces (2024) Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora worked with the Living Well Consortium and communities in Erdington in Birmingham, taking photographic portraits against the backdrop of the city’s green spaces, and exploring the benefits of nature to our health.  Sally Butcher’s Visible Bodies responds to themes of gender, care and the space of the reproductive and maternal body, through the lens of her own practice-based research about experiences of infertility.

Co-curated by Regan McDonald, Ikon’s Public Health Research Officer, and Linzi Stauvers, Ikon’s Artistic Director (Education), What are the odds? Ikon Creative Health is anchored by the belief in access for all, addressing complex public health and social care issues with a creative and communal response, formed through intensive research, partnerships and experimentation.