Our 2024 Partnership with Hospital Rooms

The exhibition recreated the Digital Art School format in the gallery space, delivering live in-house creative sessions hosted by artists such as Abbas Zahedi, Shepherd Manyika and Eileen Cooper RA, as well as beautifully filmed art activities projected in cinematic style onto the walls of the gallery, hosted by artists and designers including Giles Deacon, Sutapa Biswas and Sarah Dwyer.

Visitors were invited to spend time making artwork of their own in the space, using free art materials provided in the gallery. The exhibition offered a chance for visitors to experience the various gatherings that are taking place in mental health hospitals across England and to contribute to the charity’s investigations and experimentations into new models and methods of humanizing mental health spaces. Artworks created by visitors during the sessions were installed on the walls throughout the exhibition.

The floor of the gallery was covered with an adaptation of Nengi Omuku’s artwork created for Hellesdon Hospital in Norfolk, UK, depicting a clear blue sky that people will be able to walk, sit and create on. Hot air balloons featured in the artwork were transformed into bean bags for the public to sit on and draw, and will be installed in Hellesdon Hospital later this year.

The exhibition culminated in a live fundraising auction at Hauser & Wirth London, hosted in partnership with Bonhams, on Wednesday 11 September 2024, and an online-only auction at Bonhams on Thursday 12 September 2024, which helped reach the £1 million fundraising target. Both auctions showcased works donated by artists across the UK, including Rana Begum, Sutapa Biswas, Frank Bowling, Catherine Goodman, Bharti Kher, Thomas J Price, Peter Liversidge, Do Ho Suh, and many more. Some of these works were shown in the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Over the past two years, Hospital Rooms and Hauser & Wirth have delivered a series of ambitious new projects in NHS mental health hospitals across the UK through the exhibitions and auctions ‘Holding Space’ (2023) and ‘Like there is hope and I can dream of another world’ (2022). The partnership has helped to fund transformational creative projects to bring contemporary art and architecture to Springfield Hospital in Tooting, London; Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich; and Sandwell’s Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service in West Bromich. This is in addition to launching the Digital Art School in 750 mental health sites across the UK. All proceeds from the auctions will sustain the year ahead for Hospital Rooms, with plans to deliver new projects to transform mental health care units in numerous UK cities, including Bristol, Norwich, London and Wakefield.

About Hospital Rooms
Hospital Rooms work to benefit people with Severe Mental Illness (SMI) diagnoses, commissioning leading artists such as Hurvin Anderson, Julian Opie, Sonia Boyce, Anish Kapoor and Chantal Joffe to transform in-patient units and secure wards, where opportunities to experience and participate in art are significantly reduced. The charity also work in mother and baby, out-patient and young people’s units, recognizing both the broad range of people whose lives are touched by mental illness, and the transformative potential of creative programs and vibrant care environments—for patients, their loved ones and staff.

The organization was founded when a friend of artist Tim Shaw and curator Niamh White was sectioned and admitted to a NHS mental health hospital. On visiting her, they were shocked to find the hospital environment was cold and clinical at a time when she was so vulnerable. Having both worked in the arts for 10 years, Shaw and White felt they had the skills and community to be able to transform these spaces with unique and site specific artworks. Hospital Rooms envisions a new world where abundant and meaningful creative opportunities are readily accessible to people with severe and enduring mental health diagnoses, and where mental health hospital environments are inventive cultural spaces offering solace, comfort and dignity. Since 2016, Hospital Rooms has undertaken a number of acclaimed projects, completed in some of the most challenging mental health settings. A roster of artists is carefully selected for each Hospital Rooms’ project according to the needs of each community.