نمایشگاه عکس مبتلا به…

Affliction…

Taking medication can be understood as entering the territory of illness. This territory has different forms of belonging. All of us, at some point in our lives, experience taking medicine and temporarily inhabit this land for short, discontinuous periods. But taking medication throughout one’s life permanent residence in the territory of illness is the condition of chronic disease.

Chronic illness creates a kind of dual belonging that alters a person’s way of being in the world. It introduces new regulations and relationships into the patient’s life, gradually reorganizing everyday existence around treatment and control. Obedience to this new order also means submission to a vast and complex global system of pharmaceutical design, production, and distribution. Within this system, the patient is not only a consumer but also a participant who sustains it.

Each pill is connected to an extensive, capillary network of consumers across the world bodies that are regulated and standardized through shared protocols of treatment. The logic of mass production and distribution depends precisely on this standardization.

Although medication appears in clean and orderly packaging inside boxes, bottles, and blister packs it is embedded in a dense web of need, information, compliance, protection, and control.

Farough Mazloumi