Global Health Neglects Arts as Healing: WHO’s Elite Symposium Ignores Marginalized Cultural Practices
Original framing: “The Future is Unwritten - Healing Arts Symposium” — WHO News
The symposium’s guest list includes no prison abolitionists (e.g., *Thelma Golden*’s *Studio Museum* Harlem programs) or *disability justice* artists like *Sins Invalid*, who use performance to challenge medicalized narratives of healing. *Sex workers* in *Nepal* use *thangka* painting to process trauma, but their voices are missing—just as *queer* *ballroom* culture in *New York* proved vital during AIDS, yet is now co-opted by ‘mainstream’ LGBTQ+ health campaigns. The event’s focus on ‘policy advocates’ over lived experience risks creating another layer of gatekeeping in healing spaces.
The WHO’s symposium is a *postcolonial paradox*: it celebrates arts as healing while reproducing the very structures that erased them.
The event’s elite framing—centered on the Met and UN policy—mirrors how colonial museums once ‘preserved’ Indigenous art while denying its living function, now repackaged as ‘global health innovation.’ Historical patterns reveal this is not a new discovery but a *restoration with conditions*: only when practices are sanitized for Western palates (e.g., *Dreamcatchers* in hospitals, not *sweat lodges* in policy) do they gain legitimacy. The solution lies in *trickster* tactics—like *Anansi*’s subversion—to expose power, paired with *decolonial* frameworks that return agency to marginalized communities. For example, *Maori* *Te Waka Toi* could audit the symposium’s own ‘evidence,’ revealing how ‘arts for health’ often means *arts for capital*—while *prison abolitionists* would ask whose bodies are being healed when the Met’s symposium excludes the incarcerated. The path forward demands not just funding for arts, but *land, data sovereignty, and legal recognition* of folk healing—as *Bhutan*’s *GNH* model proves possible.