Racheal Crowther's exhibition 'Liquid Trust' at Chisenhale Gallery transforms the space into a multisensory critique of care systems entangled with military, corporate, and state control. The show features a repurposed British military mobile health unit, bubblegum-pink walls (a shade once used in US prisons to suppress aggression), and a synthetic scent that blends infant formula compounds with military-funded oxytocin research. Visitors encounter a 'Health Control Post' structure, clinical lighting, and hidden dispensers diffusing a custom fragrance coded as sweetened infant milk powder, all designed to expose how nurture and intimacy are co-opted as tools of behavioral manipulation.
The exhibition matters because it offers a dark, forensic counterpoint to prevailing art-world discourses on care, which often emphasize soft, communal solidarity. Crowther instead reveals how top-down care infrastructures—from military surplus to industrial additives—discipline and surveil bodies under the guise of protection. By acquiring the military unit through a contractor that returns proceeds to the Ministry of Defence, the artwork itself becomes complicit in the systems it critiques, raising urgent questions about institutional power, behavioral engineering, and the politics of exhibition-making in an era of heightened authoritarianism.