Exhibition Trip

Bedlam:the asylum+beyond:
The exhibition being held at the Welcome collection featured artists like Eva Kotatkova, who used her personal experience with asylums to create visual responses. Through her collages she emphasizes the communication of the patients with their surroundings and the constraints that they felt.

Something that stood out to me the most was the concept that a few patients were experiencing signs of phantasmagoria, about the shape or surface of their bodies. The degree varied with each person, some believed to have spines sticking out from their sides while others believed themselves to be so fragile that even a long stare could harm them. The thought of somehow being incomplete and having a different perception of reality directly influenced my project,

Memory and remembering events or people from the past can be fragmented and broken. Through photographs, the missing parts can be found. In my own project I looked to past photographs of my own family, seeing great grandparents and faces I hadn't seen in years brought back fragmented memories. In a similar way that Kotatkova portrays her work I focused on black and white photography and presenting it in a fragmented format.

The patients realities varied, some believed they were completely alone and the doctors and nurses were merely phantoms. While others expressed fear over the phobias and anxieties that they felt would physically leave their bodies and fly across their rooms. The way in which they dealt with such perceptions also varied but remained in a similar pattern, repetition of writing lists of their phobias to writing lists of the contents in their rooms gave them some form of relief and peace.

 Autumn Lexicon:Serpentine Gallery
 Looking at Marc Camille Chaimowicz 1972's exhibition piece 'Enough Tiranny', was brought back recently to the Serpentine Gallery. His work focuses on the concept of time and the act of repetition and identity. The artists wanted to show how time is an abstract concept for the audience to recognize 'that it can fold on itself.'  He saw this was the only way people could understand how fluidity of time, in the term that events from the past could still feel so recent and vice versa. Visually he achieved this by creating a 'de ja vu' appearance through the use of scattered objects across the floor. With the use of soft warm colours, Chaimowicz managed to make the room come to life, as if there just had been a party.

Fluorescent Chrysanthemums: ICA
The final gallery we went to was the Institute of Conceptual Art. It was another past exhibition from the 60s brought back for another time. Commemorating one of the first European exhibitions on Japanese modern art, the posters and graphics were very fluorescent and geometric in shape. Almost minimalistic in design however they still managed to incorporate a sense of traditional Japanese influence. Such as the symbolic shape of the chrysanthemum, it was continuously brought up in various art works and articles regarding the original exhibition.