Exhibition Dates : 4 February – 1 May 2021 / Extended to 14 May 2021

Visits were online, right here <3

The Four Humours was a digital exhibition by Warren Garland, shown online at Darling Pearls & Co’s website. The exhibition presented, over the period of three months, four new video art pieces from the ongoing web based series Welcome To Baltia. Each of the new works uses found footage gathered from the internet to playfully explore the elements, philosophies and remedies that underpin humouralism and how these affect the mythological island of Baltia during a health emergency. 

Originally described by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, in Greco-Roman geography Baltia was a mysterious island in northern Europe connected with the production of amber. The exact location of Baltia has always been disputed. The Baltia presented by Garland at welcometobaltia.com is a dystopian update that parallels our real world. Various satellites, Google Earth, computer signals, wi-fi and other virtual residues are presented as proof of the island’s new, mutated existence. 

Blood-Sanguine, Yellow Bile-Choleric, Black Bile-Melancholia and Phlegm-Phlegmatic follow the chronological structure of humouralism. In it, the basic elements of the Empedocles model (air, fire, earth, water) correspond to seasons, sites of formation, and resulting temperaments. The series considers the psychological outlook of the humour which titles each film, how this applies to current day events, the projection of idealist dreams, and the pursuit of a perceived happiness in the future.

Humouralism was the principal form of medical theory for almost two thousands years, dating back to 500 BC to ancient Greece and accredited to Hippocrates. These theories of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment only started dying out because of medical advancements around the time of the enlightenment. In an era before the discovery of micro-organisms, physicians attempted to treat illness by balancing the humours. Patients were bled and purged and given poisons like arsenic, which was thought to regulate the black bile imbalance believed to cause the plague. Like a horoscope or the lines on a hand, the balance of the fluids was believed to be unique for each individual, and to determine personality traits and moods. The theory assumed no body-mind dualism. Each fluid also corresponded to a season, to a chronological period in a person’s life, and ultimately to temperament traits and behavioural deviations. In Garland’s four films, our contemporary unrest and social upheaval is attributed to a humoural imbalance afflicting the body politic.

Footage Credits // Blood-Sanguine

Footage Credits // Yellow Bile-Choleric

Footage Credits // Black Bile-Melancholia

Footage Credits // Phlegm-Phlegmatic

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