Pope.L: Hospital

"In this exhibition, the guest, the stranger (a very old meaning of the word hospital) stages and is staged in turn via nine makeshift mock-ups or artworks to memory, decay, forgetfulness, convalescence or mourning, sites where personal and institutional metaphors of care metastasize into scenes of spills, shelves with holes, fallen towers, broken bottles, dripping liquids, always something ongoing, always something undone and wanting fixed with dust or stains or trampled flowers. Hospitalis that sensation of lying on your back on a stretcher in a hallway cold staring at the veins in the ceiling above while it stares right back." Pope.L, 2023

The title of this exhibition, Hospital, is derived from the Latin word hospes which means a stranger, foreigner, or guest. The show's narrative is intentionally ambiguous but its title alone is hugely evocative implying, among many other things, the combining of personal and collective, or institutional, experiences.

I like the sense of dislocation that is evident in multiple places in this exhibition, similar to the piecing together and fantasising of memory fragments.