by Alison Hugill // Jan. 20, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Wellness.
Lukas Feireiss is a curator, writer and educator whose practice provides conceptual development, design and implementation for diverse formats of knowledge dissemination and visual communication, such as exhibitions, publications, symposiums and events. As a visiting professor for transdisciplinary artistic education at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) from 2021-24, Feireiss launched a series of discursive encounters in collaboration with the International Society for Arts and Medicine (ISfAM) and the Network Arts and Medicine at the Charité, titled ‘The Healing Arts: Encounters in Arts and Medicine.’
‘The Healing Arts’ series—which has produced more than 20 events featuring medical professionals and artists of all kinds—aims to cross disciplinary barriers and create alliances between the arts, medicine, science and other fields, through conversations that engage some of the fundamental questions at work in each, from the ethics of care in art curation to the agency of patients in institutionalized medicine.
Reflecting on the meaning of the Latin word “cura” in his practice more generally, Feireiss highlights the importance of attention and responsibility in how we gather and host difference. The ISfAM will present a congress on the topic, titled ‘The Healing Arts – Forging Alliances of Arts & Medicine,’ in Berlin and online from June 18th to 20th, 2026.
Lukas Feireiss, portrait // Photo by Bella Lieberberg
Alison Hugill: There’s a lot being made in contemporary art circles out of so-called cross-contamination (to use an unwanted medical term) or cross-pollination between the arts and sciences. The vastly different approaches and methodologies at work in each field seem to inspire one another to think differently. Through the lens of ‘The Healing Arts’ series so far, what do you see as the importance of this particular interdisciplinarity?
Lukas Feireiss:: Interdisciplinarity between art and medicine is often framed as a trendy “cross-pollination,” but I think it’s more existential than fashionable. We are living in a moment where monodisciplinary expertise is collapsing under the weight of complexity. The systems we inhabit—ecological, political, technological, biological—are so interwoven that no single discipline can pretend to have epistemological sovereignty anymore. We need cognitive diversity, not as decoration but as infrastructure.
The lens of ‘The Healing Arts’ makes this visible very quickly: art and medicine are not separate “worlds,” but parallel modes of knowing and caring, both fundamentally concerned with the human condition. The difference is not that one is true and the other is poetic. Science is evidence-based; art is, by nature, ambivalence-based. And that is not a weakness. What evidence is for medicine, ambivalence is for art: the permission to hold contradictions, to allow multiple meanings, to stay with uncertainty without panic.
In medicine, ambiguity is often treated like a problem to be eliminated. In art, ambiguity is the actual medium. The point of bringing these approaches into dialogue is not to turn artists into amateur clinicians, or clinicians into conceptual performers. It’s to create a third space in which different intelligences can meet without being forced into premature consensus. A space where we learn to become conversational across languages we don’t fully speak.
And perhaps most importantly: this interdisciplinarity is a method of re-humanization. The WHO definition of health already tells us that health is not simply the absence of disease, but the attainment of physical, mental and social well-being. In other words: a deeply cultural and relational condition. Medicine and art are training grounds of attention and attention, today, might be the most under-recognized form of care.
AH: Can you talk about some examples of how artistic practices and healthcare practices can inform one another?
LF: One of the most productive misconceptions is that art enters healthcare as a “nice add-on,” a softening agent, a kind of aesthetic aromatherapy. What we keep discovering through ‘The Healing Arts’ is that the exchange runs deeper: artistic and clinical practices can retrain each other’s perception.
Take the theme of observation. In medicine, observation is often idealized as neutral: a clinical gaze that sees “objectively.” But in our dialogue formats we insist that observation is never neutral—it is cultivated, trained, biased. What you attend to and what you miss becomes an ethical question. In our last session on observation, we brought together a former vascular surgeon, Luc Haenen, investigating illness in painting, and the artist Ahmet Ögüt whose work tests the political conditions of visibility. Suddenly “seeing” becomes not just diagnostic, but civic: who gets recognized, who gets protected, who gets treated as visible enough to matter?
Or, take film and psychiatry. Cinema thrives on emotional resonance and interpretive complexity. It teaches ambiguity, empathy, moral imagination, not as sentimentality, but as skill. Medical education often disciplines emotion out of trainees; film can bring it back in as a legitimate epistemology. Not by replacing clinical rigor, but by widening what counts as knowledge in the first place.
And then there’s the case of developmental origins of health and disease. Thousands of researchers study how early exposures shape lifelong health, yet outside expert circles it remains invisible. An arts-based science communication initiative like The Art of Creation demonstrates what art does uniquely well: translate complex biological knowledge into public experience, narrative, image—into something that can travel through classrooms, communities and parliaments.
So yes, art can improve outcomes and well-being—the 2019 WHO report synthesizing thousands of studies is important here—but beyond “effects,” art offers medicine something else: a repertoire of ways to deal with complexity without reducing it. And medicine offers art a ruthless proximity to vulnerability, responsibility, consequence. Together, they don’t become the same but they become more capable.
AH: The latin word “cura” means care, responsibility, attention or concern. How do you hope to see this aspect of care and wellness play into curatorial projects?
LF: If “cura” means care, attention, responsibility, then curating becomes something quite different from programming tasteful events and generating cultural capital. It becomes a form of applied ethics: the design of situations in which attention is distributed differently, and where certain forms of knowledge—often marginalized or excluded—are allowed to enter public life.
In my curatorial work, and especially with ‘The Healing Arts,’ I’m less interested in curating “about health” than curating conditions for encounter. We stage dialogues not to deliver solutions, but to build a safe and brave space (a third space) where medicine, art and the public can share uncertainty without shame. It’s no coincidence that my coaching practice is called Cura.Vision, because for me, care is inseparable from vision: from making potential visible and translating inner clarity into outward impact.
Care, in that sense, is not a moral mood; it is a method. It means: listening before speaking. It means training the kind of attention that does not look away when things get complex, painful, politically uncomfortable. It means acknowledging that healing is not only personal, but systemic: health is a political terrain where power relations play out—who gets treated, who gets funded, whose pain is legible, whose bodies are protected, whose lives are considered disposable.
Curatorial care also means resisting the instrumentalization trap. There is a dangerous trend right now: demanding that art justify itself through measurable utility—as therapy, as wellness content, as mental health tech support. But art’s power often lies precisely in its refusal to be reduced. It operates as ambivalence, as weirdness, as contradiction. So my hope is that cura-based curating can hold the tension: acknowledging the real health benefits of the arts without turning artists into unpaid care workers for broken systems.
In short: “cura” means taking responsibility for how we gather, how we frame vulnerability, how we host difference—and how we build alliances that can outlast the event itself. Not just relevance, but resonance. Not just discourse, but consequence.
AH: The International Society for Arts & Medicine will host the congress ‘The Healing Arts – Forging Alliances of Arts & Medicine’ in Berlin this June. Can you talk about some of the themes that will be addressed there?
LF: The ISfAM congress is designed less as an academic conference in the traditional sense and more as an infrastructure for alliance-building across fields, continents and cultures. In other words: not just knowledge exchange, but collaboration under real conditions.
The thematic tracks capture the breadth of what “healing” means today — and how urgently it needs to be rethought: ‘Structures & Spaces of Care’ asks how artistic practices can be embedded in health systems through policy, funding, institutional transformation and even architecture: what would it mean to design healthcare spaces not merely for efficiency, but for dignity, inclusion, and relational well-being? ‘Arts in Times of Crisis’ takes seriously the role of art in trauma, disruption, displacement—from pandemic recovery to humanitarian and ecological crises. This is not symbolic work; it is collective repair. ‘Lifelines: Art and Care Across the Lifespan’ brings interventions from perinatal care to youth psychiatry, aging, longevity and end-of-life support into one shared frame. The arc of life becomes a curatorial and medical agenda. ‘Embodied Research’ defends practice as knowledge: healing is not only measurable but lived; not only data but body, memory, time. And finally, ‘Future Impact, Practice & Policy’ aims to synthesize insights into a shared message that institutions, funders and the public can actually act upon.
Two guiding perspectives cut across everything: AI and innovation, and longevity—not longevity as biohacking lifestyle fantasy, but as sustainable impact: continuity of practice, partnerships that last, frameworks that can be implemented beyond a single event. There’s also a strong emphasis on format: pre-conference workshops, immersive artistic healing experiences, artist-scientist duos and a permanent retreat space on site. And crucially: accessibility through hybrid participation and live AI-supported translation. So the congress is not asking “can art heal?” in a naïve way, it’s asking: under what conditions can alliances between arts and medicine become structurally real, socially equitable and future-proof?
The Healing Arts: Dr. Johann Ahn, Martin Binder and Ana Lessing Menjibar // Courtesy of The Healing Arts
AH: Your next event for ‘The Healing Arts’ series at Charité is between a dancer / choreographer, an artist / industrial designer and an internist / palliative care physician. Can you preview what that conversation will tackle and what common ground these individuals might find?
LF: I’m excited about this conversation because it stages a triangular meeting between body, material and mortality—three things we all have, and rarely discuss together without euphemism.
Dr. Johann Ahn works in oncology and palliative care, a field where the limits of medicine become painfully clear and where the question shifts from cure to care. Not care as consolation, but care as precision: patient-centered, tailored medicine, shaped around needs rather than protocols. He brings the reality principle into the room: what illness does to time, identity, relationships, agency.
Ana Lessing Menjíbar approaches healing from the other side: the body as archive, flamenco as embodied knowledge, choreography as a practice of transforming wounds, memory and resistance. Her work asks: what happens when we treat the body not just as a biological object but as a carrier of history? What forms of knowledge live in movement, rhythm, breath, beyond clinical language?
And Martin Binder traces materials, infrastructures, environments—literally following the substances used to build institutions back to their origins. His lens expands care beyond the human: environmental questions, public space, supply chains. If medicine deals with internal ecosystems, Binder investigates external ones, and how both shape vulnerability.
The common ground is attention and translation. All three practices translate invisible forces into perceivable form: pain into language; memory into movement; extractive material histories into images and infrastructures we can no longer pretend are neutral. They also share an ethics of responsibility: what you do with bodies—in hospitals, studios or cities—matters.
What I expect the conversation to tackle is how healing is never just a private affair. It’s relational, environmental, political. And it’s time-based: healing unfolds across durations—sometimes slow, sometimes abrupt, sometimes unfinished. In palliative care, in dance, in material research, “endings” are not merely failure, they are conditions of meaning. So rather than asking whether art heals or medicine is creative, we’ll ask something more interesting: What does it mean to care when certainty runs out? And can we build practices—clinical, artistic, civic—that train us to stay present exactly there?
Additional Info
studiolukasfeireiss.com
thehealingarts.online
cura.vision
Event Info
Charité Medical Center
Dr. med Johann Ahn, Martin Binder and Ana Lessing Menjibar: ‘The Healing Arts: Encounters in Arts and Medicine’
Conversation: Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026; 6-8pm
thehealingarts.online
Paul Ehrlich Auditorium, Virchowweg 4, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
International Society for Arts & Medicine (ISfAM)
‘The Healing Arts – Forging Alliances of Arts & Medicine’
Congress: June 18-20, 2026
event.fourwaves.com/healingarts-congress
martas Gästehäuser Hauptbahnhof Berlin
Seydlitzstraße 20, 10557 Berlin, click here for map
