by Alison Hugill // Jan. 9, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Wellness.
Entering a new year, we revisit a previously featured topic that remains pertinent for many reasons: wellness pervades our thinking about not only ourselves and our bodies, but also the environmental and political spheres that we inhabit daily.
An ever-creeping cultural iteration of wellness has garnered it the epithet of an industrial complex. A multi-trillion dollar global industry that markets and commodifies personal health—through products like fitness apps, organic foods, supplements and lifestyle and sleep enhancements—seeks to cover over deep-seated holes in our systems, often making collective issues into individual problems. While I have written about this topic at length elsewhere, a key take-away stands out for me—in so many instances in the conversation around wellness, community care is regularly trumped by the more profitable concept of self-care.
Yuri Pattison: ‘Light Therapy’ from the series ‘Sleep Industry,’ 2019, on view in exhibition ‘Our Happy Life’ at Canadian Centre for Architecture // Courtesy of the artist
The choice to feature this topic at the beginning of the year is no accident, as this is, of course, the time of new year’s resolutions and the aggressive marketing campaigns that accompany the quest for a “new you.” The way that artists are dealing with wellness sometimes directly addresses this so-called “Wellness-Industrial-Complex,” as we have seen in past featured interviews with Maryam Jafri and Yuri Pattison, and sometimes it is approached in a more subtle manner, revealing the role that the wellness of our planet plays in ensuring health across species. In a previous article about the Berlin-based Feminist Healthcare Research Group, wellness reappears as a biopolitical category, one that is not experienced in the same way by everyone. As the author concludes, with respect to the exhibition by the group as part of the 2020 Berlin Biennale: “Art does not necessarily have to be linear and its product, the artwork, does not have to be physical, just as wellness and health are not always about the body.”
For this issue, we will begin with a review of the ‘Arts of the Earth’ exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao, which, through its excavation of more than six decades of soil-based art, builds a narrative of wellness on a global scale, positioning health and sustainability as a communal, ongoing process. As Chris Erik Thomas writes, “caretaking as a relational bond forms a throughline in the show.”
Isa Melsheimer: ‘Wardian Case,’ 2023, glass, potting soil, seeds, plants, dimensions variable, installation view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao // Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, © Isa Melsheimer, Bilbao 2025
In another featured review, Lars Holdgate considers the current solo exhibition of Alexander Basil, titled ‘Error 404,’ at Berlin’s Galerie Judin. As Holdgate writes, “the body takes up a central role in Alexander Basil’s work. But beside being laid bare, it is the way these versions of the same body are entangled with and mediated by other components, like physical spaces and media. How do screens and bodies relate?…they are literally in bed together, (de)humanizing one another.” Reflecting on the abundance of screens in the works, Holdgate considers their role in wellness culture and its touting of escapism from the problems of daily life.
Alexander Basil: ‘Untitled,’ 2025, oil on canvas, 140x120cm // Copyright the artist, photo by Trevor Good, courtesy of Galerie Judin, Berlin
Meanwhile, William Kherbek interviews French artist Tabita Rezaire, described as a “health-tech-therapist,” whose work looks at healing as a concept across generations and dimensions. On her website, she describes her work as dealing with the ways in which “healing and energy streams remind us to access our own inner data center, to bypass western authority and download directly from source.” Kherbek probes how wellness is aestheticized in Rezaire’s work, as well as her interest in commodification and quantification, or the optimization logic that she explores, from the world of software design, here applied to the body.
Xie Lei: ‘Temptation IV,’ 2025, oil on canvas, 170 x 140 cm // © Xie Lei, courtesy the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, photo by Tino Kukulies
In another contribution, Jesse Slater approaches wellness from its inverse, reviewing Capitain Petzel’s exhibition ‘Not I.’ The group show takes its name from a video work by Samuel Beckett, also presented in the exhibition, which investigates embracing suffering and the frailty of our bodies as a way of coping with mortality. Wellness, in this case, is sought by accepting its finite nature.
Acknowledging that wellness is not only about the human or the bodily, nor solely a positive pursuit, this featured topic considers multiple dimensions of what it means to “be well” and who, or what forces, defines the parameters of wellbeing.
