“I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

In winter 2024, Sop had a severe relapse of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), leaving them housebound in South East London.

That summer, in the days leading up to a friend’s birthday celebration, the artist rested carefully so they would be able to attend. The night before, they started taking what was touted as a “magic” pill for insomnia. They didn’t sleep at all and had to miss the party. But in a sleep-deprived haze, they wrote, as they described in a recent interview [1], “a solidarity rant, a kind of letter to other disabled people stuck indoors.” 

When Shape Arts, a UK disability arts organization, approached Sop with a commission, they decided to adapt the essay into a script for We Year, a mixed-media love letter to others living with energy-limiting conditions. The short film premieres at RestFest—a film festival and virtual space by and for the disability community—as part of a program co-organized by The Remote Body, Resting Up Collective, and Ort Gallery. 

With a poetic voiceover and ethereal soundscape, We Year immerses viewers in a chronic illness flare during a sweltering summer, blending decades-old archival footage from when Sop was well enough to move outside freely with recent phone footage shot at home. Shifting between past and present and between interior and exterior, the experience is at once isolating and unifying, claustrophobic and liberating. 

We Year also features 16mm direct animation, a technique that involves drawing and scratching moving images directly onto film stock rather than recording with a camera. Here, Sop used ink to overlay the orange stress bars from their Garmin watch across the entire film—a constant representation of their body that acts as a symbolic barrier between them and the audience. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist? 

I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid, when I was asked, “What do you want to be?”, I was like, “An artist!” I honestly have never thought about doing anything else. I grew up in the deep countryside, and there wasn’t much access to contemporary culture, although I was obsessed with music and music magazines. There was this teen music magazine called Smash Hits that I loved, and I made collages and scrapbooks of pop stars. When I was 13, I went to a big retrospective of the massive British artist David Hockney, who just died, and it was the first time that I’d seen contemporary art. It blew my mind, and that’s the first time I remember thinking, “Oh, this is something serious that I want to do.” 

What questions or themes does your art usually explore? 

I find it hard to make work that isn’t about my life and the things that I’m dealing with. What I do always ends up being ultra-personal. That’s not something that a lot of people do, necessarily. The act of living as a chronically ill person means that you have to live in the world in a very different way from people who are not chronically ill. Chronic illness is a fertile area for ideas. You’re living the life and thinking about the life at the same time. If you’re an artist or someone who thinks about things in conceptual ways, you can’t help but try and interpret your life into art-making, projects, or ideas. Everything’s interesting. It’s like living life wonky.

As a chronically ill person,  I can’t do a 9 to 5. I can’t necessarily keep to plans, and I can’t always do basic things, like sometimes even look after myself in a normal  way. The agency that I have is to interrogate what this life means and the challenges that it poses and what is interesting about that. What can I say that’s beyond how I would perhaps describe being sick to a stranger? Like, what’s within that? All of the work that I make—even if it looks not about that—is going to be about that.   

And then the other part of it is that I grew up in the field and was a tomboy covered in mud. My understanding of the world was through nature, and now I’m in a flat without a garden. I can see some trees in the park just over there, but quite often, I’m not well enough to go and hang out in the park. I am pretty obsessed with nature and the fact that I can’t get to it. I can’t really have that life currently.  

In your bio, you describe yourself as “a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky.” Would you please elaborate on what this means? 

When I wrote that bio, I was making work about my body being the same as the microbiome in the soil. “A torn and crooked leaf” is being chronically ill. “A root embedded in the dirt” is really what it sounds like, within the context of that specific work. And the “shoot reaching to the sky”—my work deals with pretty hefty emotions, but there’s always hope. My life is not a miserable life; it is hopeful, and I do believe there’s something so crucial in being chronically ill that you absolutely have to keep hope alive. It takes a lot of work to do that and to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s super important. If you have this restricted life, you absolutely have to shoot for the sky. Because time just goes on.  

What does working in crip time [2] look like for you? What are your long-term goals as an artist? 

If you’re truly working in crip time, it’s fairly impossible to have long-term goals. You haven’t really got a choice when you work. You can do your very best to carve out time or space. Currently, I have about a couple of hours in the early morning when I can manage to do something. My afternoons and evenings—I simply can’t make work then. If you have such a limited time to make work, the amount of work you make is going to be low. It will have to meet your capacity, and that doesn’t fit well with current art market production timelines or expectations. Sometimes, you can’t make something for a year because the thing that you should be working on—and the thing that is your work—is your health. That’s your full-time job.  

I deeply believe that making in crip time actually is truthful to the world. We would probably all be better off if we did. Really, it means making work to your capacity, and that can mean a lot of things. You don’t need to be ill to make to your capacity. 

It’s a more authentic timeline of meeting yourself where you’re at, rather than forcing yourself to meet arbitrary or toxic timelines. 

You haven’t chosen to have chronic illness—you’re forced into doing that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. Asking what would I like to do for my long-term goals—I find it very hard to answer because, first of all, I live, like, day to day and, second, when I think about what my long-term goals would be, it’s from the perspective of someone without a disability because I currently cannot see how I would be able to do more than what I’m doing unless I had an enormous amount of more support. 

How did you decide which media to work with for this project? 

Films and writing have always been the two mediums I mostly turn to, and actually they’re the most accessible things for me to do now, being housebound. When I was asked to make the film, I just didn’t have it at all in my means to film new work or leave the house, so I had to kind of figure out how to make a new work out of what I had, which was this personal essay I wrote about being stuck inside in the summer. I made the film throughout another summer of being stuck inside. A lot of chronically ill people turn their camera or phone or whatever onto their surroundings, so I had bits and bobs that I filmed. When I started making films, I would just film tons of different stuff. I had my little Hi8 video camera around the whole time, so I had lots of little clips that I hadn’t used, and I didn’t actually think that I was ever going to use them for anything. But that obviously wasn’t enough, and I didn’t really want to make a film which was just a film inside my house—there’s plenty of films like that. I had a whole bunch of old footage from the 90s. I digitized all of these tapes a few years ago, and they looked so great. A lot of that stuff was filmed out of the house, and then there were funny effects that I filmed which made it into the films. There’s a lot of blobs of color, which are actually motorway lights and ended up being this really nice kind of texture, which floated over and broke up some of the images.  

Hi8 and MiniDVs are the two cameras I was using in the past, so I have footage from both of those. And then there was 16mm direct animation. Each section of the film has a different animation running over it, but the animation is quite transparent, so it’s always there. It’s textural and has multiple meanings. And then I commissioned my friend to make the soundtrack. 

Would you elaborate on the meaning of the title of the film? 

The thing that’s turned me on most about this film is the fact that I can try and get “to year” and “yearing” adopted as a new way of describing spending all this time being sick. I think the word “year” is long enough for people to imagine, “Whoa, you are sick for a whole year. That’s a really long, unbearable time.” But then you make it into “yearing,” and then it could be even less than a year, but it’s probably closer to a year or multiple years. Then I was interested in what would happen if the years were then broken up with periods of being well, with relapses included as well.  

I find it really tiresome to have to explain the last five years of my life. So to not have to say, “Well, I was sick for a couple of years, housebound and bedbound, and then I got well again, and then I had a relapse”—it’s just like, “I was yearing.” I would love for it to become part of the lexicon of chronic illness.  

What does it mean to have “We Year” screened at RestFest? 

There’s this informal network of crip friends who work with each other. Not everyone works together, but we all know each other and there’s really close friendships within this group. They’re all small, crip-led organizations that have been made pretty much for the same purpose, which is remote events, screenings, and workshops. I was just really keen to connect and uplift all of these organizations. We created this program together, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s really nice making things with your friends. The access intimacy side of it all is real. Creating or programming with your friends is a very accessible way of making because we all understand each other and our capacities. I’ve said capacities a million times. 

You need to coin a new term for that as well. 

Okay, I’ll get on that for next time. 

We Year, through July 12 (if you start watching on June 28); RestFest Film Festival. “I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

[1] “Interview with artist-filmmaker Sop + a Special Screening of their New Film.” RestFest, 2026,
https://restfest.substack.com/p/interview-with-artist-filmmaker-sop. 
[2] In her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” 

In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the opportunity to speak with Margo Weishar about her play: 

Guy: 
Hello Margo. It is such a pleasure to speak with you. For anyone who may be deciding if they want to come to the reading, can you tell us a bit about the play and the subject matter? And about how you became interested in writing about Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Margo: 
What really interests me is people who break out of the norm. 
People who do things that are completely extraordinary, and what motivates them to do that, and what is their personal cost in doing that. 
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and then she had a career in promoting women in medicine. But I also wanted to show her as a human being. The only pictures we have are of an old woman, but she was a vital, curious, intelligent, daring, brave person who fought against incredible odds to get where she was. And so that’s who I really wanted to investigate. You know, we all rely on these pioneers to break barriers down so that people like me can walk through them. But what does it take from them to do that? What are the choices they had to make in your own lives to make that possible? So that was the question that really ended up fascinating me. 
 

I got a theater degree because it was something I’ve always done in my life, and I decided I really wanted to formally go and learn. And when I started working with playwright Michael Hollinger, I took a class on solo performance. 
I always loved historical fiction, and I liked plays that were based on historical women. And so, I thought I’ll look at Elizabeth Blackwell as a subject for this solo performance. I started researching and found there was a wealth of primary source information. Not only she, but also her sister Emily became a doctor, and then a lot of her other family members were prominent. There are letters between the nine brothers and sisters in collections at Harvard and at Oxford which I could read online. The more I read and the more material I looked at, the more I felt, wow…this woman had an amazing life! After I did the solo performance, I started developing it as a play. And I really liked where it was going and refined it to the point where I had a public reading at Villanova in May of 2024. 

Guy: 
As you know, I am also a physician-playwright. There are not all that many of us! Can you say something about what it was like as a doctor transitioning to becoming a playwright? Do you feel like you have a special perspective because of being a doctor?  

Margo: 
I feel like my life has had two parallel tracks because I grew up around theater and performing. My father was a scenic designer who was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I am the first and only doctor in my family. I was always that kid who was good at science, but also the lead in the play. I produced and directed the first musical production at Penn med school ever: Sondheim’s Company with a full orchestra, which we put on with all the med students. So, it was always part of my life even during my medical training, although there was a time when I had to kind of put it on the back shelf. 

As far as playwriting, I feel very passionate about telling certain stories that haven’t been told. And now as a woman who has lived a life, had a career, raised three children, and now has a grandchild, I have a lot of life experience. I felt like that kind of voice is somewhat rare in the playwriting world, especially telling stories about women. And especially about women in science. I’ve had the opportunity to play on stage Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with developing the first computer and the first computer language. 
I’ve played Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and biologist in the 1700’s, who drew beautiful studies of insects and plants.
I directed a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer in the early 1900’s. I’ve always been fascinated by these incredibly accomplished women who history has ignored. I really felt like that was my impetus for trying my hand at it. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. But having my work read by others I could see it was starting to reverberate with people. People were liking it and I was liking what I was hearing. The whole skill was very new to me and quite surprising. 

Guy: 
One of the things I don’t think people who are outside the theater world realize is just how long the development process of a play can take. In what way do you hope the reading at the College of Physicians will help you, and what do you expect will happen next? 

Margo: 
I have another amazing mentor, Ed Sobel, a professor at Villanova and a professional dramaturg. Ed has been working with me on focusing and refining the play. And it is just an amazing thing for me to work with somebody who is so great at what he does. Because he’s asking me questions and really trying to focus on what the essential story is that I want to tell. Having good actors is another good thing. The way people say things will help me to streamline.  

And of course, the last and most important element is how it plays to an audience, somebody who’s seeing it and hearing it for the very first time, what they will come away with and whether I can achieve the emotional impact of what I’m trying to say. As you know, things can be back to the drawing board after that experience. I might hear certain things that really hit perfectly or other things I never even considered. It’s not like a novel, where you finish it, you publish it, and it goes out in the public. You can have multiple full productions before you publish a script because sometimes something doesn’t work in a production. Maybe it’s just the wrong actors. And then you go see it somewhere else and you think, no, that scene was great. You have to see it. It’s a collaborative art, and we need all those people, designers and directors, to interpret what we wrote before we can say, yes, this is the final version. 

It’s interesting. I was in London last week and I got to see a Tom Stoppard play called Indian Ink. This play had been produced 30 years ago. 
And when Stoppard went back to it, he changed the ending. 30 years later! So even Tom Stopford can say yes, I think I can do it better now. 

Guy:  
Thanks for talking to me today, Margo. And best of luck on the reading. 

Margo:  
Thank you! 

On September 9, 1982, on her 25th birthday, Julie Ridge became the 242nd person to swim from England to France. On April 11, 1991, Ridge was hospitalized for 21 days and unceremoniously received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder I. Julie’s one-woman show Bipolar & The English Channel tells the story of how a casual mile-a-day pool swimmer became an English Channel swimmer in nine short months and her 17-hour, 55-minute zig-zag journey across those grey murky seas. It also tells the less glamorous story of a world-record holding endurance athlete who wakes up one not-so-fine day floridly manic, locked down on an unforgiving New York City psychiatric ward – and her arduous journey back to sanity and a fulfilling life.  

On March 26, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia presented a performance of Julie Ridge’s one-woman show: https://collegeofphysicians.org/events/bipolar-english-channel-one-woman-show In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the pleasure of speaking with writer and performer Julie Ridge about her work. 

Guy: Julie, I had the privilege of seeing your show Bipolar and the English Channel a couple of years ago in New York. It was informative, entertaining, and inspirational. As you know, I help arrange programming for the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. As a psychiatrist and playwright, theatrical representations of mental health issues are right up my alley. I am so glad it is working out to have you bring it to the College! 

The very striking title of your piece brings together two images that seem completely unrelated, but you fuse them together so convincingly. Can you say something about your background that sheds some light on the title, about your life as a swimmer, and then your discovery of your diagnosis? 

Julie: With the title, I’ve tried to conjure the image of how my life with bipolar disorder and my unlikely swim across the English Channel run parallel to each other and are symbiotically intertwined. My decision to the swim the English Channel came on as spontaneously as a manic episode. I tell the full story in the show, but the germ was planted when a friend who swam two miles-a-day broke his wrist, and I doubled my casual one mile a day in empathy for his mandatory pool abstinence. At the time, I was an actress performing in my first Broadway show and swam for peace of mind and to stay in shape. The story of learning I had bipolar disorder is the subject of the second act of the show – so, I ask your readers to come see it to hear the tale. 

Guy: Can you tell us how and why you decided to turn your story into a show? What is it like for you to perform? What has the reaction to the show been like, especially from the mental health community? 

Julie: After my diagnosis in 1991, I went back to school to get my master’s degree and became a psychiatric social worker. Over time, I’d developed a seminar that told the story of my English Channel swim and bipolar diagnosis. The decision to turn the informal seminar into a show first arose when I discovered I was a single hour shy of collecting my Actor’s Equity pension. I asked all my friends who were still in the theater if they could write me into a contract show, maybe as a person lying behind a couch or something, even just for the first act of one show, and I’d refund them my salary – I just needed that single hour to collect a lifetime pension. A couple of years went by, no offers were made, I was getting closer and closer to 65, so I decided to do it myself. I wasn’t going to lose my pension over one measly hour.  

On the 5th Anniversary of the non-profit organization I founded in memory of my dad, I pulled together the least expensive Actor’s Equity contract possible that would get me that hour. That contract was four staged readings at the Studio Theater on Theater Row off Broadway in New York City. It was the first time I’d disclosed my bipolar disorder publicly and, frankly, I was terrified. But community members, family, buddies from high school and college, and colleagues were incredibly warm and receptive.  

That four-day run led to performances in the United Solo Festival off Broadway for two consecutive years. A performance at my sister’s temple outside of Boston was seen by a friend with connections to the Sedona Festival, which led to another gig at the JCC in Hartford Ct and so on. It’s my hope that I will be able to perform the show each year in venues across the country.  

As for how it is to perform it – I actually have acute social phobia and get terribly anxious every time I perform the show. It’s odd, because performing when I was an actress was easy and highly enjoyable. But those shows were written by other people and not about my life. Doing something so intimate and personal is quite different. I never know how it’s going to land and be received.  

Guy: I see that in addition to Bipolar & The English Channel, there is a documentary film about you. Can you say something about how this came about?  

Julie: Seems there’s a story behind everything! Zac Norrington, a film student at the New School in New York City needed a subject for his Capstone project senior year. Long distance swimming and cold-water swimming was something of personal interest to him because of a near-death experience his grandfather had. Zac brilliantly thought to contact Ned Dennison, the Director of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF) for recommendations on swimmers he might interview in New York. Turns out that swims I’d done in 1983 and 1985 put me in the record books. My athletic resume in the 1980s was out of the ordinary, and to my amazement, I was inducted into IMSHOF in 1985.  

Ned recommended me and a couple of other swimmers. Zac interviewed a few of us, showed his preliminary work to his class and professor and they all said “forget about the other swimmers. Focus on Julie’s story.” He did. His short documentary BREATHE, is about the intersection of my double swim around Manhattan Island and my bipolar disorder. He submitted the doc to several festivals, we got showings at many of them, including the prestigious ReelAbilities Film Festival. At our last festival, The Greenwich Village Film Festival, we won Best Short Documentary. Zac was a wonderful director, cameraman, editor and producer. He completed the entire movie during the pandemic. I’m very impressed with the work he did culling together our interviews, still photos and archival footage. It’s been an honor attending talk backs to represent the film. 

Guy: Can you tell us about the organization you founded, the Frank Ridge Foundation? What its mission is, why you decided to start it, and about some the foundation’s projects?  

Julie: Ah, the subject nearest and dearest to my heart. Thanks for asking. Frank Ridge is my dad – one of the kindest and most loving dads a girl can be fortunate enough to have. Dad died in 2013 after 90 full years, rich with adventure, and community involvement. Pops supported everything I ever did, unquestioningly and unconditionally. He was by my side stroke after boring stoke for all of my swims, was in Hawaii melting in the heat with me when I completed the Ironman Triathlon and rode side-by-side with me as we biked 3,700+ miles across America. Dad was also a pretty smart businessman, and he left me and my sisters some money. I’ve never had much money – I chose lucrative fields like acting, writing and social work – so what he left felt like a fortune. I took almost half of my inheritance and founded a non-profit in his honor, the Frank Ridge Memorial Foundation, Inc. (frankridgememorialfoundation.org), dedicated to living well with mental health conditions through awareness and understanding. Our primary work is:  

• Creating and facilitating resource-rich topical seminars, using accurate compassionate movies as the springboard for conversation, for community members and mental health practitioners required NY continuing education.  

• Maintaining our resource-rich website. 

• Providing meaningful part-time employment for individuals living well with mental health conditions.  

• And performing Bipolar & The English Channel whenever the opportunity arises. 

I’ve loved working for myself running this organization for the past 12 years and hope to keep on for as long as I am able! 

BREATHE TRAILER: 

VIEW THE FILM HERE: 

https://www.docnyc.net/film/doc-nyc-u-life-in-the-big-apple/breathe/

Dr Ravi: Good afternoon and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.  To begin, can you tell us something about yourself?

Dr Unni: I was Pulikkal Subran and Vilasini’s second son born in 1969. At that time Chettichal, the remote village in Thrissur district, Kerala, India where I was born, was a ‘pure’ village in the real sense, with all the features and richness of a remote countryside untouched by modernization.

Maybe I was destined to be alone while growing up. I grew up as an introvert. Spoke little; brooded always. Plants and flowers, bees and butterflies, birds and branches of sandalwood, dreams, and I – all grew up together. The silence was our language. Intimacy was our grammar. 

In 1986 I enrolled in the Government Medical College, Thrissur. Seven years after this (in 1993) was the most important phase of my evolution. I learned the simple truth that while friends are the greatest teachers of life and love, they are also, by the very nature of close friendship, able to “invade” your emotional and psychological space, to manipulate your thoughts, actions, and even perceptions of the world, sometimes even negatively.   At this time my tastes in the arts began to change; light music gave way to classical compositions and watercolors to oils and acrylics. Themes evolved from landscapes to surrealism, to abstraction and postmodernism.

Dr Ravi: What got you interested in the arts?

Dr Unni: Frankly, it was a natural activity for me, just like eating and playing, right from the earliest days I remember. I used to draw and paint from childhood days, continued it always. With more ‘education’, always informal, from my artist-teachers, the style changed, subject matter changed, and the materials changed. The most important change was the medium. My primary medium changed to photography from the late 1990s. I do paint even now, and make sculptures from found objects and granite, and create on-site installations. What keeps me attached to photography is its innate quality of making memories permanent, and its quality of refining my vision of the world.

Dr Ravi: You were a keen painter during your undergraduate medical days. Do you still pursue painting?

Dr Unni: Yes, I do. But I seldom exhibit. It remains mostly a private engagement. After opting for photography as my primary medium, I have been combining photographic printmaking with painterly practices like over-painting and over-drawing on photographs creating works of art that stay at liminal spaces, smoothening the distinction between painting and photography.

Dr Ravi: When and how did you get interested in photography?

Dr Unni: I got interested in photography around 1995, and I bought my first SLR camera a few years later; photography has occupied the major share of my expressive activities since then. At that time, it was my connection with nature and its beauty that attracted me to photography. I was always amazed by the transience of natural phenomena like light, the moon, and the monsoon. What attracted me was the fleeting moments in the natural world that had no permanence. I hoped to preserve those moments through photography. Later I understood that the transient moments must be transient to possess their innate elegance. This understanding took me to more of conceptual art photography wherein I had to tax heavily my imagination, execution, and labor-intensive processes in both analog and digital photography. Through this practice, I was trying to make my thoughts and memories into palpable objects that can last and stimulate me (and others) to make more meaningful art.

Dr Ravi: What were some key moments in your journey as a photographer?

Dr Unni: For a true photographic artist, every moment is a key moment, the only question being how sensitive he or she is in recognizing the true significance of the moment. As for my evolution as an artist, one significant point in time was my meeting with Mr. Vijayakumar Menon, an art historian and teacher, a relationship that lasted for decades until his passing a year ago. Some other people who influenced me as an artist were Mr. T.N.A. Perumal, a nature photographer and naturalist, and Mr. Theo Berends of the Netherlands, a fine art photographer. The single most important influence in my evolution was, and continues to be, my association and friendship with platinum photographer and photo-historian Mr. Herbert Ascherman Jr, of Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He mentored me in the nuances of black & white photography and analog photographic processes in his Cleveland studio. 

If you mean to ask about my achievements, I have had solo exhibitions in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the USA, the Film and Industry Museum in Germany, and a few group shows in Australia, the Middle East, and the UK, in addition to several venues in India. I received the title ‘Associate of the Royal Photographic Society’ from London in 2007 and a Senior Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in 2013. Along with some of my friends, I founded PhotoMuse – the Museum of Photography in Kerala, southern India, in 2014, the first of its kind in the country. What I consider the greatest achievement is my contribution to mentoring a new generation of photographers in Kerala and beyond, imparting to them the same edge of a new vision that I owed to my mentors, through various academic activities of PhotoMuse over a decade.   

Websites by Dr. Unni Krishnan Pulikkal

www.unnipulikkal.art 

www.photomuse.in

Dr Ravi: How did the idea of the photography museum (PhotoMuse) come to you?

Dr Unni: My interest in the arts and its history has taken me to many museums around the world. Most of my journeys, especially those I did in the company of my mentor Herbert Ascherman Jr., always focus on art and photography museums. This allowed me to understand how important museums are to preserve our cultural legacy, to spread awareness about the cultural and humanistic significance of art, and to appreciate how significant it is to instill goodness in the human mind through art, music, literature and other cultural practices. This becomes especially important in a world filled with falsehood, negativism, antagonism, and violence. It was this realization that fuelled thoughts of setting up a museum of photography – the PhotoMuse – that can over time become a repository of photographic legacy and become a universally accessible tool to impart cultural education and spread awareness about the environment.

Dr Ravi: Can you share some interesting facts about the museum and its inauguration?

Dr Unni: The ‘museum’ was, interestingly, begun in a 50 square foot space (yes, you read it right – fifty square feet!) under the stairs of the Sneha hospital, with one staff, one computer and a small rack, in 2014. Soon, we shifted to a rented building and later moved to two other rented places over 10 years. In 2023 we purchased land, redesigned the existing building into a contemporary museum, and shifted to this new place in early 2024. The museum now holds more than 15000 objects of photographic history and is growing! It now has a board of trustees, and around 500 active subscribed members. Mr. Herbert Ascherman Jr. who underwrote the museum and is an advisor to the museum flew in on very short notice from the USA to India to inaugurate the museum on 10th March 2024. 

Dr Ravi: You have blended the modern and the ancient in your house. Can you share something on how you constructed the house? And how you maintain it?

Dr Unni: My house is basically built in a traditional South Indian design. It was made with locally available natural materials like laterite and wood, mostly reused wood sourced from other ancient houses. The only space that you could probably call modern is my studio where I have photographic equipment, and the paraphernalia for printmaking. It also doubles up as an acoustically designed space for music and movies. 

Dr Ravi: How do you balance your medical practice with your photography and artistic interests?

Dr Unni: Even though my formal training was in modern allopathic medicine, not art, I am living now as a part-time medical practitioner. I practice medicine half of the day, and art during the other half. It goes in a highly synchronous way because the basic undercurrent in both streams is humanism. Medicine heals mostly physical illnesses; art promotes mental wellness. The feel-good moments of art practice help me balance the stressful hours of medical practice. The goodness of art nourishes my mind, and cultivates a more humanistic culture within, helping me recognize patients as ‘human beings with a problem’ rather than ‘cases with beautiful findings’. 

Dr Ravi: You have an open-air art gallery at the entrance to your hospital. Can you mention more about this gallery?

Dr Unni: Yes, the Open Art Gallery in a hospital is something rare in India, I think. It is a project by PhotoMuse Museum and sponsored by the hospital.  It was established in memory of Vijayakumar Menon, an advisor of the museum right from its inception. The gallery holds photographic and art exhibitions around the year, accessible 24 hours a day to the patients, bystanders, and the public at large. In addition to this, the hospital exhibits various works of visual art on its walls. Together, these works of art create a soothing ambiance that calms and eases ailing minds.

Dr Ravi: What are your future plans for the museum?

Dr Unni: We are trying our best to broaden its activities, enlarge its already good collection, widen its reach to different strata of society, and, if possible, rebuild the museum with more space and amenities.

Dr Ravi: How do you think arts should be incorporated into the medical curriculum in Kerala?

Dr Unni: Fascinating and relevant question! Medical professionals need to be exposed to more cultural spaces of the country to broaden their humanitarian outlook and increase their understanding of how people engage with that cultural space. This exposure to the humanities will strengthen medical professionals’ ability to make sensible diagnoses based on peoples’ socio-cultural backgrounds and deliver treatment with humanism at heart and hand.

Dr Ravi: Any other points from your side?

Dr Unni: As part of broadening my cultural activities, I have stepped into another new art project. In addition to the PhotoMuse Museum which holds my photographic collections, I am curating another art museum at Kodakara in Kerala. The Art Museum of Love, which opened for public viewing on June 10th, 2024, holds and exhibits most of my art collection. It is based on the theme of LOVE, and consists of pieces which I have collected over the last 25 years, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, fabrics, and more. I hope this museum will help more people understand the value of the emotion we call love with a vast spectrum of intertwined emotional threads, including friendship, parental love, romantic love, and sexuality.

Happiness to you!
Unni

Dr. P. Ravi Shankar was a classmate of Dr Unnikrishnan at the Government Medical College, Thrissur, Kerala and lived in the same residence hall with him. He has long been fascinated by Dr Unni’s work and visited him at his home in December 2023. 

Webphoto: Jodhpur Royal family, c.1910, Albumen Print, 300×260 mm, Unknown Photographer, PhotoMuse Collection

A Tale of Two Museums  

Ravi Shankar Mar 4, 2025

Unni, a talented artist and photographer, founded two unique museums in Kodakara, Kerala, celebrating love and photography.

While in Oslo, Norway visiting family, Russell Teagarden went to the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) to speak with Øystein Ustvedt, who is a curator and noted expert on the art of Edvard Munch. The interview concentrates on Munch’s work expressing emotional dimensions of anxiety, illness, grief, and suffering. Ustvedt talks about how Munch’s life story explains the sources for his empathy and artistic inclinations, identifies and discusses the paintings particularly effective in expressing emotions illness and suffering generate, and considers how Munch’s work could benefit health professions students and practitioners. Russell’s 5½-year-old granddaughter teaches him how to say, “National Museum” and “goodbye,” in Norwegian, with varying success.

Links to paintings discussed:
Puberty (1894)
The Sick Child (1885)
Spring (1891) 
Sick Girl (Christian Krogh, 1881)
Death in the Sickroom (1893)
The Spanish Flu (1919)
Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943)
Melancholy (1892)
The Scream (1893)

Link to Russell Teagarden’s blog piece in According to the Arts on Øystein Ustvedt’s book, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life.
Link to National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo

The Clinic & The Person is a podcast developed by our editor Russell Teagarden to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide.

Feature image from Wikipedia Commons