This Happened to You Too, Remember?

Everyone on the planet lived through the same event, and no one got through it unscathed. Not since the Black Death have humans, as a species, faced the same relentless terror of an immediate threat to their lives. The pandemic, with a single strand of RNA, quietly removed things that could not be replaced: funerals, weddings, performances, graduations, jobs, friendships and touch itself.

The Unsaid CIC is sponsoring a six-week London group exhibition of 30 visual artists, each addressing one concrete pandemic loss. The final room holds the Witness Wall, where visitors write a single sentence about their own loss and place it in a crevice for others to read.

The public conversation about the pandemic has moved on. The grief has not. Most people, asked directly, will say they would rather not think about that time again, which is precisely why naming a single concrete loss, in the company of others carrying the same weight, can do what avoidance cannot. The door is not marked COVID. It is marked loss. That is a door most people have been looking for.

Mark Heitner, MD, is a retired psychiatrist and MA Painting candidate at the Royal College of Art. He was the only Western physician working directly with the original Chinese clinical team addressing COVID-19, contributing to the ICU treatment protocol published in JAMA and adopted across more than 180 countries.

The ACE grant application provides for a single co-curator, whose responsibilities will include leading the open call, shaping the exhibition structure and public programme, overseeing RCA graduate collaborators on the Witness Wall, and representing the project in press and funder interactions.