What are the odds? Ikon Creative Health is an off-site exhibition, at the Library of Birmingham, which explores the role of art in supporting health and care systems.  

Bringing together three years of Ikon’s collaborative research with visual artists, academic and charity partners into an immersive display, the exhibition reflects a range of lived experience from diversity in infant feeding to ageing and dying well. Accompanied by a 1970s-style graphic identity, designed by Birmingham based artist Foka Wolf, What are the odds? plays on a ‘game of life’ TV show aesthetic, simulating a journey through the different institutions that define a life course.     

What are the odds? presents creative health not only as an intervention, but as a way of questioning, shaping and understanding the conditions we live in. Several artists have worked with communities to use creative methods to break down societal barriers and advocate for health justice. Photography is a key tool for artists Ayesha Jones in Leave A Light In My Room (2023), Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora in Green Spaces (2024) and Vic Moyosola and Sadie Barnett in (Re)Coded (2024). Foka Wolf’s installation Why Are We Stuck in Hospital? (2023) visualises the quantities of data produced through academic research to advocate for policy change. The lack of care facilities and reproductive discourse in public spaces are addressed through the artwork Feeding Chair (2022-ongoing) and Sally Butcher’s research-based Visible Bodies (2024). The exhibition also showcases the work of Niki Gandy, Ikon’s Artist in Residence at HMP Birmingham (2025-26), who collaborates with prisoners to explore their exposure to light in prisons, untangling the impact of incarceration on vitamin D and Circadian rhythms. 

Co-curated by Regan McDonald, Ikon’s Public Health Research Officer, and Linzi Stauvers, Ikon’s Artistic Director (Education), What are the odds? Ikon Creative Health is anchored by the belief in access for all, addressing complex public health and social care issues with a creative and communal response, formed through intensive research, partnerships and experimentation. Read more about Ikon’s Creative Health programme.

Partners include: Artscoop Central; Changing Our Lives; Art and Activism Cluster, Birmingham City University; Birmingham City Council, Public Health and Adult Social Care; Birmingham Hospice; HMP Birmingham; In Certain Places, University of Central Lancashire; Jameel Arts and Health Lab; NHS Living Well Consortium; School of Social Policy and Society, University of Birmingham; Stuart Hall Archive Project, University of Birmingham. 

This exhibition is supported by Art Fund’s Reimagine grants programme. Exhibition interpretation is formed in partnership and consultation with Birmingham City Council Public Health. 

What are the odds? Ikon Creative Health is accompanied by a satellite display that maps Birmingham City Council’s Public Health’s ongoing strategic development of a Creative Health programme across city partners Birmingham Museums Trust, Hippodrome, Ikon and Midlands Arts Centre.