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I am ill as I write this, a situation I attribute to taking public transport now that winter has arrived Instead of cycling – a kind of mobile hermeticism – I share Berlin’s warm and scarcely ventilated tube carriages with other bodies Moving through the city’s underground network as one unruly organism, we travellers constantly trade infections To pinpoint the initial point of origin – who or what made us sick, when, and if it could have been avoided – is a fruitless task Where would we even start? Everyone could be blamed, and also no one   Across the Western world, the bitter medicine of austerity is making many of us sick Depression and anxiety are commonplace, and thinking about the future often triggers a pervasive sense of dread Sickness Report (2018), an exhibition by Czech artist Barbara Kleinhamplová currently on show at Berlin’s SAVVY Contemporary, begins with the idea of a diseased public sphere The exhibition comprises a cinematic, dual-screen film of the same title, set at sea; video footage detailing the labour involved in ship production; an array of objects along a table – anti-depressant pills, bones and jigsaw pieces – that read like evidence; and three pseudo-corporate diagrams projected onto the gallery walls   The titular film unfolds aboard a small ship, and cuts intermittently to a medicine factory, where workers watch a crowd of pills hurtling down an assembly line Sitting on a bench made from a ship construction mould, I watch the onscreen vessel drift on a featureless expanse of sea The narrator, a male anthropologist, tells us that the ship is defective, as is its crew They have succumbed to a mysterious malaise known as the ‘Big Sickness’ Unable to navigate, they are now at the mercy of the tide, but they have begun to infect the surrounding waters On a nearby wall, a pair of projected diagrams shows another seafaring vessel Its parts have been fastidiously labelled, but by an economist, rather than a shipbuilder ‘Privatisation’ and ‘corporate spirit’ are written where hull and stern should be, while other components are labelled ‘productivity’, ‘medication’ and ‘gig-economy’