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Panacea Casebook: a multi-layered live art event that toured to Tate Britain, Modern Art Oxford, CCA Glasgow, John Hansard Gallery Southampton, and Baltic. The project, which was cross disciplinary and cross-institutional, took the form of a live performance on stage, involving a combination of video documentation, live presentations, puppetry, costumes and props. Panacea Casebook was initiated by the cross-institutional ‘Panacea Research Group’ Walker (ECA), Bromwich (NCL) Pinsky and Renton (UEL) and funded through ACE and Wellcome Trust.

Panacea Casebook has developed and extended research from the earlier (2003-2007) large-scale project Panacea, which had previously set out to discover whether it was possible to test an artwork using the same empirical testing systems used in medical sciences.

Panacea Casebook aimed to challenge the orthodox thinking around the relationship between art and wellbeing, through creating a faux ‘lecture-performance’, aimed at specifically challenging and interrogating perceptions of the artist as social reformer and the artwork as ‘cure all’ for the ills of society.

Set against the instrumentalisation of society through government funding of culture. Panacea Casebook was a discrete project that built on the earlier large-scale Sci-Art research project Panacea, which brought together a team of researchers from the sciences and the arts in order to develop a method for empirically testing the effect of an artwork on its audience. Panacea Casebook extended and built on this earlier preliminary research, inverting it through a series of live lectures-performances, which presented scientific data alongside fictionalised case studies. This blurring of fact and fiction, combined with the use of puppetry, video projection and live action created a multi-layered art event that shifted audience perception of the relationship between, art, science and the medical sciences, and opened up a discourse amongst diverse audiences around the extent to which an artwork can affect well-being in society.

Panacea Casebook has been contextualised, discussed and peer-reviewed in a key international symposium ‘The Contingency of Curation at Tate Britian’ 2010, and the focus of public panel discussion at ICA in 2009 with Nicolas Bourriaud, curator, Tate Triennial to launch the Book PANACEA: Pinsky, Walker & Bromwich; (Publisher John Hansard Gallery; 2008, ISBN 9780854328628) Essays by JJ Charlesworth, Michael Stanley, Evelyne Toussaint.