Leila Abrahams is an interdisciplinary artist born in Cape Town. Her work draws from her lived experiences with chronic illnesses, survival, and grief. Amid a decade-long relationship with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Leila Abrahams was also recently diagnosed with a rare form of Tuberculosis of the heart.

Her exhibition And TB Too, focuses on the artist’s experience during the five months Abrahams was ingesting the Tuberculosis medication. This body of work reflects on the stages of the artist’s infectious disease and the medication melding within her body. These works record the moment where bodily matter and medicine become indistinguishable, questioning and resisting the moment at which the identity of the patient and the illness become indistinguishable from each other.

Usually concealed within her body, the contradictory dance of survival is made public and encoded into colour and shape through threaded compositions of red and white capsules. The visually vivid blood-flooded colour of the TB medication is the antithesis of an ongoing conversation around ‘invisible’ diseases.

Abrahams recalls being shocked by the jarring, bright orange tears, sweat, and urine, which followed as the medication’s pigment permeated through her system; her artworks are marked as well, with a colour perhaps only other infected and affected people may recognise.

It is an intimate but loud provocation of the privilege and ignorance of those who do not recognise it. Playing further into the misrepresentation of chronic illnesses, the artist leans into the symbolic significance of the colour white in communicating the arrival of her diagnosis. Already facing an entirely separate disease, the use of white speaks to a yearning for a purity denied by the stigmatisation of illnesses such as TB.

Beginning the series with a work containing a single capsule in colour, Abrahams will forever associate with Tuberculosis; the artist transmutes her challenges through modes of materiality and hue, wordlessly encouraging engagement and compassion with her story and stories similar to hers.

The artist makes use of knotted, trailing thread around the edges of her works, too, emphasising the connection and obligation between doses; the body’s nervous system and to interrogate the image of the ‘lifeline’. These are determined details that demand time, attention, and intention.

The two-toned tapestries continue to evolve, and as the medication’s pigment overtakes, audiences are tasked with interpreting the tone underlying Victorious, the title of the final work in the series, as the punctuation mark for Abrahams’ series.  Does the biting orange symbolise the completion of treatment or a body that has succumbed to its ailments?

Text by Misha Krynauw