Virga Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition of Linda Alterwitz’s Injection Site to celebrate the upcoming release of her first monograph, Linda Alterwitz: Injection Site published by MW Editions. We invite you to sign our guest registry to see the exhibition and find more details for purchasing the book. This subscribes you to our Virga Gallery newsletter, which you can unsubscribe to at any time.
“Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives.” – Joseph Beuys [1]
Participation. Was there a more contentious word in 2020 to 2023 when the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world? We were asked by governments (then ordered by them) and our communities to participate in group wellbeing and shared responsibility for our health and our loved ones’ health by being vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus, to wear masks in public, and to keep our distance from others we might encounter. It felt very strange. In fact, not being allowed to hug a friend when I saw them was one of the most disturbing things for me during the crisis. But the World Health Organisation (WHO) assured us it was for our own protection and those we loved, and they were right. But so many people felt the ask was too much; that any participation in these measures was an infringement of personal rights, an infringement on their right to choose.
These sentiments rippled their way around the world setting up a debate that has not been resolved but has been quietly shelved as we moved on. This debate is exactly the schism that Linda Alterwitz entered in her own quiet way during the crisis. When a friend complained of pain in her arm after being vaccinated, Linda was curious to see what her thermal camera would show. She had no way of knowing in that moment that she had found a way to visualise the body’s inflammation response to the vaccine. What she saw was the heat being produced by the body in the dark, blotchy, and spidery affected pathways along veins and in the muscle of her friend’s arm. It was startling. However, Linda realised she had uncovered a way of seeing what was happening to humanity in the moment of crisis and she wanted to share what she saw.
Published by The New York Times in October 2024 with an opinion piece by immunologist, Dr Rick Bright and included in her new monograph.
Working with friends, neighbours, and local health organisations, Linda photographed over 130 vaccinated arms which became Injection Site. But more than this, even though that was no insignificant achievement, once she had a body of work and was ready to exhibit the work, she turned to participatory practice for a working structure in her exhibitions. As an American, Linda witnessed the fraught political debate of vaccination denial happening in her community and in the national news, and she knew she wanted to do something that would allow people to just talk and express their feelings without fear of reprisal. Installed with her exhibition of Injection Site photographs she placed a community board and made sticky notes and pens available. She asked one simple question: ‘Why did or didn’t you have the vaccination?’ then she asked people to write their answer anonymously and leave it on the board. She had an outpouring of responses from both sides of the debate.
Even now, three years after the end of the Covid-19 crisis, this question still elicits divergent responses. We have not found a resolution to the debate, but Linda’s contribution is significant. Not only did she see under the skin to the body’s response to the vaccine, something which medical instructors and institutions still find very valuable to share with their students and the public, but she found a way to enable people to express their fears and frustrations, and the hope for finding a way out of situations like this. She reached out to people’s humanity through her art at a time when we were all in a shared crisis. She asked people to participate, and they did.
Thinking about what it means to participate, it is a freedom of choice, some would say privilege. When we are denied the choice to participate, we become test subjects, objects, and slaves. We are denied our humanity when the right to participation is taken away from us. Human history has given us plenty of examples of the removal of the choice to participate. Currently, we are feeling the pressure of a new kind of removal of the choice to participate with the imposition of technologies we’re told will make life better, even though it is made to appear that we have given our consent; that we have made the choice to participate; that we agree technology will improve our lives and we welcome the intrusion. That claim has yet to prove itself, and for most of us, that consent is provisional. In the meantime, we try to reclaim some authenticity in our lives and try to hold onto the precious personal connections that make our life worth living.
Participation is going to become an important word. It will shed its privilege and become a word that we aspire to. It will become a word that we remember with nostalgia when we remember the freedoms we once had. It’s going to be a word that we cherish, even if we don’t now.
[1] Zucker, A., 2017. Everybody is an artist. Artfully Learning [blog]. Available at: https://theartsandeducation.com/2017/05/07/everybody-is-an-artist/ [Accessed: 8 Sep 2026].
A short overview of Injection Site:
Linda Alterwitz: Injection Site, published by MW Editions, will be released on 22 September 2026. Advance orders are being taken now.
Injection Site is on view now at Virga Gallery to celebrate the release of her book.
In October 2026, Injection Site will be on view at the Ulrich Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Nursing School at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas.
In 2025, Injection Site was part of FORMAT Photography Festival in Derby UK.
In October 2024, Joanna from Injection Site was selected by the image editor at The New York Times for publication with an opinion piece by Dr Rick Bright who blew the whistle on the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.
Injection Site has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Linda has been invited to speak about Injection Site in a wide range of contexts, including at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at University of Nevada, Las Vegas coming up in December.
