Watching You, Watching Me: On Panteha Abareshi and the Spectacle of Illness

Panteha Abareshi, CARE AT COST (2025). Glass, ribbon, cardboard, stainless steel, assorted electronic parts. Image courtesy of the artist and Human Resources, Los Angeles (HRLA). Photo: Josh Schaedel.

Everyone is getting sicker. Measles, a deadly virus once eradicated in the U.S., reached a record number of cases in January of this year.¹ Infections from COVID-19 are ceaselessly downplayed despite the serious consequences of contracting the illness. Our working conditions are only becoming more dangerous and more disabling as we attempt to survive this technofascist regime. And while the boundaries between well and unwell, disabled and abled have always been porous —not to mention crucially dependent on race, class, nationality, and gender—the current sociopolitical conditions are shortening these gaps considerably. Instead of this dynamic leading to greater access to health care for all people, binaries like “healthy” and “sick” are weaponized by the state to reify further what scholar Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able- bodiness,” or the idea that a “normal” person is able-bodied, heterosexual, white, and neurotypical.² In this logic, health is defined as the absence of all illness and disability. “The sick,” or those of us in deviant bodies, then endure surveillance and regulation in an attempt to reach archetypal normality or to survive our abject positionality.

Panteha Abareshi’s exhibition CAREROTICS: On Giving and Taking, presented at Human Resources last November, considered this spectacle of illness with refreshing directness. The exhibition, an uncanny combination of video works, conceptual sculpture, and installation, transformed the gallery space into what felt like a sterile medical clinic. In the middle of the gallery, a drab teal curtain created a partitioned facsimile of a doctor’s office, a pop of color against the white box’s starkness. Across the exhibition, artworks included plastic hospital mannequins, prescription notepads, tubing, and other medical equipment—rendering an unfiltered portrait of the ephemeral excesses of the body in pain and illness.

Abareshi, a Black, queer Los Angeles-based artist, describes their practice as being rooted in their “contending with multiple medical illnesses, at the foundation of which is sickle cell zero beta thalassemia —a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain and bodily deterioration, both of which increase with age.”³ While the body—in extreme pleasure and pain—is unmistakably central across their practice in content and materiality, formally, their work takes many shapes, including video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Through the employment of hospital aesthetics and a sadomasochistic grammar, Abareshi uses the disabled body (often their own) to interrogate the hypervisibility and invisibility of their condition, and the simultaneity of those realities.

EXAMINATIONS (2025), for instance, pushes the politics of disabled sexuality beyond asexual assignment into a fetishistic arena, implicating the audience in the potential enjoyment of taboo representations of disability. Inside a curtained area in the gallery partitioned from the rest of the show, an empty medical examination table, a crash cart, and several CRT monitors were installed. Amidst medical ephemera, such as vials, gloves, and syringes, neatly organized on surfaces as if prepped for a procedure, “cripple porn” —as it is named in the gallery label—played on a set of TV monitors. Here, “cripple porn” is not merely figurative, but literal pornography featuring both real and simulated amputees, wheelchair- bound folks, and other disabled people having sex with themselves and each other. Though this appropriation and exhibition of pornography directly opposes dominant indexes of disabled and sick people as “docile” or “de-sexed,” this media’s proximity to the fabricated medical environment creates an urgent tension between subject and object, where the nude disabled body is both vulnerable and empowered.

Panteha Abareshi, EXAMINATIONS (2025). Stainless steel, medical examination table, crash cart, CRT monitors, medical ephemera, disabled body, cripple porn, cotton fibers. Image courtesy of the artist and Human Resources, Los Angeles (HRLA). Photo: Josh Schaedel.

During the exhibition, Abareshi monitored this area from a control room in the gallery’s back room, where the artist captured surveillance footage of visitors and curated, in real time, what appeared on the monitors in the gallery, switching between different disabled erotic material. The objects and images within the curtain brought to the surface how easily medicalization and fetishization, in process and aesthetic, can merge. Abareshi, now the one watching us, invited participants into this highly monitored medical environment where the public in the role of gallery spectator were now the artist’s specimen.

In this power play, Abareshi’s physical absence from the gallery space refuses the expected hypervisibility of Blackness and disability. Within the medical establishment, legible performance of disability that subscribes to the notion of disabled people as “bodies to be fixed” ironically often results in greater material access to medical and social forms of care. The artist has spoken about the practice of intentionally excluding legible renderings of their body as a means of “tearing their body away from any sort of corporeal definition, refusing to allow [their] body to even be identified as a body and taking away the validity of it.”⁴

When closely examining works from Abareshi’s exhibition in relation to mainstream conceptualizations of disability and illness, it becomes increasingly apparent how the disabled body is made into what the artist calls “a vessel for the taboo corporeal fears and desires of the able-bodied audience.”⁵ CAREROTICS confronted this watchful audience and clearly spotlighted our participation in this dynamic.

Although disabled artists critically interrogating the spectacle of illness is nothing new, this work gains potency when it meets with an increasingly ill and debilitating world. Abareshi’s works can be situated alongside a lineage of disabled and chronically ill artists—Bob Flanagan, Donald Rodney, and Xixi Edelsbrunner —who also use their experience as medicalized subjects to explore erotic desire, objectification, and authority. Considering this cosmology reveals not only theoretical and aesthetic linkages between these “sick” artists, but underscores the normalized, yet deeply ableist social choreographies that seek to neutralize care and pacify disabled people.

The empty examination table in CAREROTICS recalls Donald Rodney’s (1961–1998) Psalms (1997). The piece, a remotely controlled, empty motorized wheelchair, attended a gallery opening in Rodney’s place at the end of his battle with sickle cell anemia. While some read this piece as Rodney’s “avatar” in absentia, a Black disabled embrace of opacity cannot be separated from the historical violences against Black people or from the Western construction of Black people as sources of disease and deviance, and thus subjects to be contained, regulated, and surveilled.⁶ Confronted by the chair’s vacancy, the visitor must consider their own performance of ability as being dependent on the presence of the sick, racialized other.

Rodney’s capacity to refuse and return the gaze of his audience probed at a perennial topic for disabled and sick artists. Los Angeles performance artist and self-appointed supermasochist Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) similarly flipped ableist social contracts, completely embracing brutal bodily pain in the face of a lifelong, involuntarily painful battle with cystic fibrosis. BDSM-focused performance and poetry became a methodology through which he “fought sickness with sickness,” intentionally blurring the boundaries between caring for his body and his sex practices.⁷ Rear Window (1994) illustrates how Flanagan’s personal desires were foregrounded alongside, despite, and in relation to his worsening health condition. A nod to the voyeuristic 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window, in which a temporarily disabled James Stewart obsessively watches his neighbors, Flanagan’s performance took place at a California hotel with the artist in one room and the audience directly across the courtyard. Through a window, people watched a very ill Flanagan self- administer a wine enema. His emaciated body was hooked up to an oxygen tank while he wore nipple clamps and weights hung from his penis and testicles. The hour-long performance, punctuated by the diegetic sound of Flanagan’s artistic process and his failing body, included zero direct audience interaction.⁸ Similar to what happened inside the curtain in CAREROTICS, the viewers were transformed into voyeurs and forced to reckon with their discomfort as the artist made public what many would consider the “private activities of a medicating chronic illness and BDSM,” all while simultaneously (and maybe unknowingly) fulfilling Flanagan’s exhibitionist desires.⁹ These public performances of pain trouble the normative “assumption that a life with pain [or illness] is an ontological impossibility.”¹⁰ Flanagan’s distinct combination of deviance and sexual vulnerability muddied the dominant rendering of the disabled body-in-pain, effectively refusing vanilla notions of how a disabled person should behave in public and private.

Embodied submission and domination visually engulf the sick body in Abareshi’s The Ward (2025). Affixed to the white pedestal by a systematic web of red fishing wire, hooks connected to artificial bait sink uniformly into the sandy colored “flesh” of what appears to be a CPR practice doll. The form’s gaping mouth is held open by silver lures. Frozen, open, the sick body is ready and waiting for intervention. A port-a-cath—used to provide long-term vein access for treatments such as chemotherapy or blood transfusions—mirrors the location of the artist’s chest port and connects the mannequin torso to an IV. The erotic manner in which the body is bound to the ground-level plinth reveals an unnerving sensitivity. Under the stark gallery lighting, this generic, nameless, faceless (partial) body, reduced to a restrained object, was at the mercy of the medical industry’s power and our surveilling eye. In collapsing the space between everyday materials, such as fishing gear and a captive medicalized form, Abareshi effectively illustrates how the enduring, quotidian maintenance of a chronically ill body requires submission for survival.¹¹

Panteha Abareshi, THE WARD (2025). Silicone, stainless steel, wood, polycarbonate, aluminum, cotton fibers. Image courtesy of the artist and Human Resources, Los Angeles (HRLA). Photo: Josh Schaedel.

These interactions between artist and audience inform our discursive world’s relationship to care, and our expectations of how “the sick” and “the well” should respond to bodily and mental suffering. Isolation and classification, as defining characteristics of for-profit medicine and late-stage racial capitalism, turn care into an individual responsibility—something to be bought and then exchanged. Writer and performance artist Johanna Hedva asserts that the “language of illness is a language of platitudes,” emphasizing how the repetitive nature of our verbal expressions of care: “get, send, take, hope,” drain illness and disability of their complexity.¹² Care operates as something given to the body-in- illness with the expectation of both unremitting thankfulness and linear improvement. But what if there’s no getting better? What if you’re in pain forever?

Chronically ill and disabled artists contending with popular articulations of care give way to more expansive understandings of disability and disabled people. For example, in the accompanying text for L.A.-based Xixi Edelsbrunner’s “anti-cathartic” solo exhibition Grudge at MONTE VISTA PROJECTS in 2025, we see an outright rejection of care. “Care is over. Repair is over,” stated the press release.¹³ Throughout the gallery, large stainless steel poles were installed from the gallery ceiling, interrupting normative physical passage and requiring someone walking to distort their body around the space to view Edelsbrunner’s rubber and steel sculptures. At first glance, the works within Grudge—oversized metal tubular objects, rubber and stainless steel assemblages, and disorienting reflective surfaces—might register as quotidian, but Edelsbrunner modified these forms and their presentation. This rejection of exhibition architectures that prioritize the able-bodied experience only deepens the finality of Edelsbrunner’s initial statement. The artist’s embrace of doom is antagonistic by choice, resulting in artworks that formally and conceptually sidestep institutional and social optimism that fails to account for the violence of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal ableism.

Xixi Edelsbrunner, Grudge (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Monte Vista Projects. Photo: Jess Star.

By the same token, Abareshi’s Honorable Mention (2025)—an oversized cherry red rosette ribbon accented with the banal words often used to express consideration—thrums with a similar confrontational energy. As we read the white text from top to bottom, the excerpted “Get Well Soon” mutates into an authoritative “Get Fixed,” and ends with the curt demand: “Better Now!” That the object resembles a prize ribbon further situates popular modes of care within the world of capitalist achievement. Honorable Mention reflects back an image of our ableist world to its audience, drawing attention to the brutality of even the most routine and undisputed social interactions.

When the status quo is disrupted, we can reassess the violences we assume are necessary for making and maintaining our lives. Abareshi’s CAREROTICS explored the consequences of indiscriminate spectatorship, allowing “the sick artist” to self- articulate and return the gaze. This timely exhibition wholly contradicted the perceived neutrality of looking and of caring, complicating even the act of experiencing the artist’s work. Staying with this complexity, this rupture of norms, we can begin to tear down our allegiance to the spectacle of illness and begin to build more spaciousness for disabled people, our bodies, and how we want to exist in relation to each other.

Panteha Abareshi, HIGH PROTOCOL (2025). Silicone, foam, elastic fibers, stainless steel. Image courtesy of the artist and Human Resources, Los Angeles (HRLA). Photo: Josh Schaedel.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Aleina Grace Edwards is an arts writer and essayist focused on preserving and promoting locally-rooted arts and culture.

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