Combining seemingly incongruent practices of art-and-design and medicine, they have created new dimensions of thought processes generally connected with the two disciplines. The pieces of art are scientifically conceived and medical concepts artistically explained.
Students of Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar (VCUQ) and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCMQ) spent a semester in ‘learning laboratory,’ to produce works of art that examine the relationship between art and medical practice in a contemporary context.
The resultant six pieces of art from the collaboration have been put up on exhibition, Art and Medicine, at HBKU Student Centre.



Faryal Malick, Medical Year II student from WCMQ, with her artwork at the exhibition. 

Each body of work is made in collaboration between an art-and-design student and a medical student. The works utilise a range of materials, methods and media including ready-made objects, laser cut materials made from medical scans, photo works that examine the landscape as a metaphor for neurological conditions and sculptural works.
“We are using the medium of photography to basically show the viewer how the perception of the world changes if somebody has a psychiatric disorder. This technique is called emotional landscaping,” Faryal Malick, Medical Year II student from WCMQ, tells Community, explaining her project called ‘Underneath Within’ that she completed along with Amelie Beicken, her student partner from VCUQ.
“Our goal is that when somebody sees one of these pictures, they have an emotional reaction to it. It would help them empathise if they do encounter people with these psychiatric disorders,” she elaborates, in a chat at the opening of the exhibition recently.
In the six photo installations, they showed disorders such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), Schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and borderline personality disorder. The colour schemes used were related to the disorders.
‘Disorders like depression mutes the senses a little bit so that is why we have used more solemn colours. And then for disorders like ADHD where there is sensory overload we have used the burst of colours,” explains Malick.
“In this photo for instance, there is a fire there but there is so much sensory overload that you are not able to focus on that fire that much. And that is the way somebody with ADHD would have it. They are unable to focus on things because there are so many senses interfering like hearing and seeing,” she points to a particular installation.
Malick, the medical student, says she thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working as an artist.
“My education so far has been very science focused. For me it was interesting to see that in order to be an artist you do not just need to be good at drawing. There are lots of mediums that you can explore,” she smiles.
It really showed her, she says, that you should be exploring different things even if you have a specific major. “It brings a little bit more variety to life and makes it more interesting,” says Malick.
Emelina Soares from VCUQ and Yanal Shaheen from WCMQ have two works of art on display at the exhibition. ‘An Essence of Presence’ include loose figures open to interpretation from the audience.
“We started with the idea of a social presence of how people think of other people. How societies would have set standards for everyone. So our first idea was to come up with something where we break those standards and have an anonymous imagery or reflection of something,” Soares says.
“We focused on the viewer’s reaction more than trying to send a specific message regarding the piece. It is viewer-centric. You look at it with all these vague details and you decide your reaction of what did you think of it,” says Shaheen.
Their hypothesis, he adds, was that each person’s cultural background and preconceptions will influence how they would interpret these pieces.
After making the piece using the body, they realised, says Soares, that it can talk about a lot of things where someone who is in this position of as a child grows up and go back to being a child.
She used the skin latex to create the mould of the person shown in the form of a fetus and then created the light box to put it on in order to give it a medical sense.
Shaheen, while explaining the concept, says before they got to the project they went through a four-month period where they met every week as a class and were exposed to art, artists and their pieces, to medical information and knowledge. They worked with scanners, the research centres and then did anatomy studies.
“It was a sort of a blend between art and medicine. It was my first experience and I honestly learned a lot because now I have this critical eye when I look at an art piece,” says Shaheen.
“I never thought before that two such different fields can blend together in this way but the results amazed me,” he smiles.
Explaining their second piece at the exhibition, a sand sculpture, Soares says one of the things that they thought about when making these figures was that they are very fragile as if they last in the moment. The piece was created using sand and it also has a religious context.
“It sorts of puts a person under the understanding of ‘we came from dust and to dust they shall return.’ So it is like you are there in the moment but eventually you fade away. We humans are also following that same timeline,” says Soares.
Shaheen says the piece is also very dynamic. You can see it fading away. There is only the mouth part remaining from the face and the rest of the body has sort of withered away. The sand used in it is from Doha and the pigment applied to it is from India.
“I brought in a little sense of identity to the sand and I gave the sand a characteristic just like us humans would have, but it is still anonymous. There are no fine details. You just have the bare figure and you do not have any other figure that clearly identifies the person,” the artist adds.    
The other students from VCUQ that participated in the project were Noor al-Thani, Abdul Rahman, Mohammad Jawad, Habeeb Abu-Futtaim and Ayaz Rauf while students from WCMQ included Farah al-Sayyed, Eman al-Musleh, Mu Ji Hwang and Rebal Turjoman. The exhibition is running till May 14 at the HBKU Student Centre.