Clean up for killer artworks

Named after Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, the term hygiene can mean many things. To the Greeks it involved balance and moderation but since then its associations have ranged from physical and moral cleanliness, the prevention of infection and disease and, with eugenics, the purity of race and class.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Central St Martin's School Of Art And Design, the London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine is showing work by 16 sculptors, film-makers, photographers and installation artists (including the work of Hadrian Pigott, right) on the broad theme of 'hygiene' in various public spaces around its Bloomsbury HQ.

Julian Walker works with our fear of and desire for objects from the past. His huge wall work of fragments found on the bed of the Thames all laid out in a grid may be valuable relics but are each labelled with an infectious disease such as smallpox, leprosy or black death. Susan Brind's text-based installation shown in a display cabinet draws on the school's archived research on the accounts of sufferers of delirium caused by typhoid and typhus, while Jordan Baseman's darkly humorous short film 'Thriller' looks at the links between obsessive behaviour and aspects of hygiene using a script based on two TV interviews with Michael Jackson.

Hygiene: The Art Of Public Health, from Fri 17 May, The London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, WC1 (020-7636 8636)