Moon moving away from conjunction with Jupiter, approaching trine with Venus.
It鈥檚 not exactly a diagnosis you鈥檇 be thrilled to receive from your doctor, but this was the medical opinion Lucy Boswell received when she visited hers in 1602 to ask whether she might be pregnant.
It was just one of the verdicts that astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier doled out to thousands of patients across decades of practice. Their accumulated notes 鈥� some 30,000 pages of horoscopes, religious speculations and documented physical symptoms 鈥� form some of the most extensive private medical records in history, and are the springboard for Casebooks, a new exhibition in London.
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Cursed by a witch
For the past 10 years, the University of Cambridge has been . Available free of charge, it makes for fascinating, if baffling, reading. Lucy Boswell was told she had been cursed by a witch (sharing culpability with the moon); that this passed for medicine, even in the age of bloodletting and belief in the four humours, is mildly alarming.
Casebooks serves to highlight the digital archive鈥檚 existence. The curators invited six artists to take inspiration from Forman and Napier鈥檚 curious practice.
Lurking beneath a University of Westminster building just off Marylebone Road, and accessed via an underground car park that wouldn鈥檛 look out of place in a CSI cold open, the exhibition at the Ambika P3 gallery greets you with shouted slogans. Jasmina Cibic鈥檚 Unforseen Forseens (shown above) is a corridor, filled with painters who constantly redecorate it with stamps that show the iconography of progress through generic, propaganda-style images.
And the painters punctuate their work with staccato, Soviet-era pronouncements about the glory, importance and predictability of the future. Their rhetoric is repetitive 鈥� all bombast, no substance 鈥� by chance echoing some recent pronouncements from the Trump administration. In the weeks leading up to the March for Science in Washington DC on 22 April, the topicality of Cibic鈥檚 piece can only grow.
Some of Casebooks鈥� artistic interpretations are more literal than others, but no one felt it necessary to hide behind the time period of the source material. Here you鈥檒l find artists ready to tease out our modern and oh-so-technologically advanced relationship with the alchemical, the astrological and the anatomical.
Mental Metal, a video installation projected onto three satellite dishes by Lindsay Seers, serves as a subtle reminder that, like Forman and Napier, we still appeal to the stars for answers, albeit in more cogent and quantifiable terms. Through the seamlessly alternating dialogue of an actor who plays both Forman and himself, artist Lindsay Seers blends medieval and modern concerns to highlight that they really aren鈥檛 all that different.
Is she cheating on me? How do I move on from loss? Can we ever have children? If you loathe the idea of a person purporting to tell you your fortune, how do you feel about taking advice from an AI?
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson聽subtly undermines our ridicule of past practices with a real-time 鈥渃onsultation bot鈥� that blurs the boundary between superstition and fact, nudging uncomfortably close to the role that Google and WebMD play in modern life.
Her 3D holographic Real-Fiction Botnik聽offers 17th-century-style personal predictions: it can 鈥渄iagnose鈥� you and deliver your horoscope. Leeson鈥檚 work reminds us that superstition and home remedies delivered by seemingly trustworthy digital emissaries are still nothing more than the sum of their parts.
None of the elements of Casebooks sits perfectly alongside each other, yet they are all complementary. An insight into the original practice they are not; for that you need to do your own reading before you arrive. That said, there are banks of computers here that let you browse the digital archive of Forman and Napier鈥檚 cases 鈥� and, indeed, accounts of Forman鈥檚 frankly fantastical life. (He was an inveterate womaniser who would cast astrological charts in order to find missing socks 鈥� another timeless concern.)
Before leaving, spare a final, contemplative moment for Federico D铆az鈥檚 BIG LIGHT, a deep pool in which a lone figure tends to a robotic arm draped in foliage. There鈥檚 more than an echo of anime in this portmanteau creature, and it does well in making sense of Casebooks鈥� unifying theme: why we fleeting inhabitants of the universe look to the eternal fixtures of the natural world for answers to our internal dilemmas.
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