Toxic Transits (2024)

To stay with toxicity and its complex, intimate entanglements requires an engagement with multiple disciplines, scales, and temporalities: from environmental and medical humanities to the arts; from the scale of molecules migrating through and sometimes leaving deposits in the body, to the scale of toxified environments; from antiquity’s understanding of naturally occurring toxins and poisons to today’s complex web of synthetic chemicals, whose interplays, cumulative effects, and behaviors remain eerily opaque and uncertain. But above all, it can require intuition to identify that which is barely perceptible or perhaps even ungraspable, often extending beyond the verbal and the techno-scientific.

Set in the context of the Hagströmerbiblioteket, the Karolinska Institute’s medico-historical library, the exhibition Toxic Transits considers relationships between toxicity, body, and environment in a more-than-human world. In particular, toxicity is deliberated with a great deal of tenderness, and as a notion that, when we take on the invitation to stay with it, soon reveals its grasp and far-reaching implications, as well as deep-running interconnections between self and other, life and nonlife, body and environment, near and far.

Participating artists:

Curation: Beatrice Brovia I Nicolas Cheng

Exhibited at Hagströmerbiblioteket - Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm (SE)