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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Caroline Davies

London exhibition to explore mental health and social bonds in ‘polarised’ times

A photograph of a child sitting on a plastic stool with a rope around their waist attached to another person floating in the air and wearing a kind of spacesuit
Benji Reid, Holding on to Daddy, 2016, one of the artworks on display at Bethlem Museum of the Mind’s forthcoming exhibition, Kindred. Photograph: Benji Reid/Bethlem Museum of the Mind

From images of empty community rooms and a colourful canvas crammed with caricatures to a baby linked by an umbilical-like cord to a seated stranger, artworks on the subject of mental health are to go on display in an exhibition that examines social bonds against the backdrop of today’s polarised times.

Artists have long drawn on their own experiences of mental ill health. Staged at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, in south-east London, Kindred will explore the power of communities to make people feel comforted as well as isolated.

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