This major new group exhibition takes Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995), as the inspirational starting point for a series of new commissions in moving image, installation, sculpture, print, writing and performance by Claire Makhlouf Carter, Chris Paul Daniels, Yoshua Okón, James Richards and Camilla Wills, which are displayed alongside existing work by Michael Dean, Sunil Gupta, Laura Morrison and Jala Wahid.
Safe is set in 1987 and stars Julianne Moore as Carol White, an affluent Californian housewife who becomes increasingly allergic to everyday domestic products and routine activities, eventually moving to an enclosed community in New Mexico. It can be read
as a reflection on climate change, sexual politics, the AIDS epidemic and suburban disillusionment. At first her illness appears to empower her - to offer an escape from her stifling life. But eventually White is left frail and alone in a porcelain cabin in the desert, with the dubious promise of self-love to console her.
The ambiguity of Carol’s illness - the question of its cause, whether environmental or psychological - and the social relations acted out in the film, made it a potent starting
point for artists thinking through structures of patriarchy and institutional control, social etiquettes and hierarchies, invisible labour, infection, contagion, symptom and cure, physical responses to mental stimuli, bodily awkwardness, effects and affects. The themes of Safe are as relevant now as they were twenty years ago.

Exhibition 'Safe' at HOME, Manchester 14 November 2015 - 3rd January 2016.
DEMO SAFE is a performance event and employed four performers:
Alex Arden, Rachel Cockburn, Leonie McQuade, Kathryn Walton.
A version of the script can be read in 'Transactions of Desire Volume II, Are you Allergic to the 21st Century?'

DEMO SAFE
A working cloakroom operates in a gallery with backspace that leads to a consultation room. Workshops in the backspace include: ‘Contextual healing’ and ‘How to clean your teeth with liquorice root’. During the preview some visitors are wearing B-Cal placebo transdermal patches.
Props include: appointment cards, allergy forms, simulated smells; modernist furniture; literature on social policies; liquorice root; miswak sticks; placebo contracts; drinking water, glasses.
Dimensions: 8 x 7 x 3.5 metres. Approximately.

The research takes Todd Haynes film Safe 1995 as inspiration to investigate normalising attitudes to belonging by exploring the relation between ‘contextual healing’ – the placebo/nocebo effect and social policies.
Particular attention is paid to Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Act 1973; Broken Windows Theory 1982; Zero Tolerance and Stop, Search and homelessness policies from the 1980s onwards.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/22068