The Doctor Is Present

Waiting for the Doctor

What happens when an art gallery becomes a doctor’s office? The exhibition “The Doctor Is Present” transforms the Brixen City Gallery into an unusual space where art, medicine and social exchange come together. The exhibition opens on 10 September at 7 pm.

For the duration of the exhibition, the Brixen City Gallery will become a doctor’s office every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning. On these days, retired doctors from South Tyrol will be available to talk with visitors. Visitors are welcome to bring medical reports, ask questions and discuss any concerns or uncertainties. No appointment is necessary.

The aim is explicitly not to provide conventional medical treatment, but to create a space for encounters, listening and the exchange of knowledge and experience. What often gets lost in the time pressures of everyday medical practice is given space and time in the gallery.

The Waiting Room as a Social Space

The doctor’s office at the Brixen City Gallery also includes a large waiting room. This space has always served a special social function, almost like an extended village square: people of different ages and backgrounds meet, observe one another, strike up conversations or simply wait together in silence. For “The Doctor Is Present”, South Tyrolean photographer Gustav Willeit has turned his attention to the distinctive character of these spaces. The series, created especially for the exhibition, will be continuously modified over the course of the exhibition.

When was the last time you found yourself staring into space?

Whether we are waiting for the doctor, a message, the next bus, true love or better times, waiting is a fundamental part of the human experience. And yet, waiting seems to be gradually disappearing from our everyday lives. Smartphones fill even the briefest pauses, leaving hardly a moment unoccupied. “The Doctor Is Present” therefore also asks what we might lose when we lose the ability to wait. Do we lose our patience and sense of calm along with it? Our capacity for idleness and contemplation? Perhaps even anticipation and longing? And in a society that seeks to make use of every available moment, could seemingly unproductive waiting actually become a space of freedom? The waiting room at the Brixen City Gallery invites visitors to explore exactly that: to wait, linger, observe and engage in conversation with one another.

The medical professionals will be available at the City Gallery from 10 am to 12 noon on the dates listed below.

No appointment is necessary.

Paediatrics
11.09. / 01.10. / 04.11.

General Medicine, Advance Healthcare Directives and Palliative Care
16.09. / 07.10. / 09.10. / 21.10. / 22.10. / 05.11.

Sports Medicine
17.09. / 24.09. / 08.10.

Gastroenterology and Internal Medicine
18.09. / 16.10. / 12.11.

Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care and Advance Healthcare Directives
23.09. / 15.10. / 29.10.

Traumatology and Orthopaedics
30.09. / 14.10. / 28.10. / 11.11.

General Surgery
25.09. / 02.10. / 23.10. / 30.10. / 06.11. / 12.11.