High Society: Art, Artists and the Global Role of Drugs in Culture | Art

PMuch is written about whether recreational drugs should be legal and how we should control their use. But the reasons we use drugs are less often considered. Why Do We Take Drugs?, a new exhibition season opening this week at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, is dedicated to finding a global answer to this question in six exhibitions.

The season covers everything from Amazonian rituals to North American hippie culture, Japanese tea ceremonies and British boozing. What it doesn't do is moralize or wag fingers. Rather, its aim is to open people's minds, but with knowledge rather than substances. As the center's director, Jago Cooper, explains: “The whole 'just say no' approach to drugs, putting them in a box and ignoring them, doesn't work. It's better to have understanding and make informed choices.”

Why Do We Take Drugs? begins with “Power Plants,” which offers a global overview of stimulants, and “Ayahuasca and the Art of the Amazon,” which focuses on the powerful Amazonian hallucinogen and examines how context in different cultures affects a drug’s use. Peruvian artist Sara Flores’s captivating paintings, with their complex abstract networks of lines and dots, tell of the ancient use of ayahuasca. In indigenous communities like Flores’, the drug is drunk by select tribal members who, under the guidance of a shaman, seek answers to the questions that concern their people. “The idea is that it allows the person taking it to transcend time and connect with ancestors and descendants and the wider ecology of the Amazon,” Cooper says. “We also explore what happens when you take drugs out of those relationships and think of them as individual experiences.”

Ayahuasca is now a popular drug for Western soul-seekers. Its impact beyond the Amazon is explored through the visual staples of head shops and the New Age movement, trippy poster art and other trippy creations rooted in European realism, beginning with iconic 1960s figures like Robert Venosa, whose rainbow-soaked, ayahuasca-inspired fantasies speak of a time when drugs took on a countercultural, anti-establishment dimension.

The second part, Heroin Falls, addresses addiction by bringing together series by two photographers who at first glance appear quite different. Graham MacIndoe turned a cheap digital camera on his own heroin use in his New York apartment, creating diary-like self-portraits with a combative, raw immediacy; the project was ultimately part of his path to recovery. Lindokuhle Sobekwa, on the other hand, photographed school friends and other young people from Thokoza in South Africa in the grip of Subscribe Epidemic, a low-grade heroin mixed with cannabis and often laced with cleaning chemicals or even rat poison. Sobekwa's lush black-and-white photography is at odds with MacIndoe's lo-fi work. Yet, as Cooper points out, “it's remarkable how similar the destructive properties of the drugs are in these remote environments. The dangers are entirely cross-cultural.”

The season will close with two specially commissioned, idiosyncratic approaches to British drug use. Lindsey Mendick, the sculptor known for her unsparing, confessional clay works, will direct Hot Mess, a ceramic piece that addresses her own addiction to alcohol and antidepressants in awkward social situations, scattered around the centre's permanent collection like misbehaving guests. Ivan Morison, meanwhile, has turned to the farmland of Norfolk to create haystack sculptures inspired by an expanded notion of drug addiction. “Farmers saw their land as being pumped full of chemicals,” says Cooper. “Has the soil become an addict that needs to be weaned off drugs? Maybe drug use doesn't just affect people. Maybe it affects the whole planet!”

Stimulating works: five pieces in the exhibition

Sara Flores's Untitled (Maya Kené 152023), 2023
The paintings of Peruvian artist Sara Flores use the ancient matrilineal art of the kené: geometric patterns in textiles or painted on bodies, ceramics or wood that express the cosmic and ecological vision of indigenous peoples. These patterns convey experiences of connectedness across time and species induced by the ingestion of local plants, including ayahuasca.

Lindokuhle Sobekwas Thabang wakes up in the early hours of the morning, 2015 (Main image)
The young South African photographer photographs his old friends and neighbours in the grip of the “poor man’s heroin”, Subscribe. It shows people going about their everyday activities, whether bathing in buckets or sweeping dirty floors, in cinematic black and white that strikes an elegiac and tragic tone.

A duck-shaped priest yaqona dish
Power Plants, one of the first two exhibitions of the season, examines how stimulants are normalized through customs, such as Fijian kava, which was used socially in its homeland and banned for sale in Britain. This early 19th-century dish probably belonged to a high-ranking priest and was used for the ritual drinking of Subscribea drink made from kava.

Graham MacIndoe'S My addiction
Graham MacIndoe was a successful music and celebrity photographer for newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times when his life spiralled out of control due to addiction. He turned a cheap digital camera on himself and himself alone, documenting his drug use in brutal images.

Robert Venosas Ayahuasca Dream, 1994
Venosa, a former Columbia Records art director turned “fantastic realist” painter, is a diehard child of the 1960s and cites LSD as one of his biggest artistic influences. His ayahuasca-inspired painting shows how much the experience and visual appearance of a drug can change in different cultural settings.

Why do we take drugs? is at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 14 September to 27 April.