Psychosis Part II I is Someone Else

Group exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken

Artists: Beata Berggren, Maja Bajevic, Andreas Gedin, Matti Kallioinen. Renja Leino, Håkan Rehnberg, Aura Satz

Curators: Elsa Ekesiöö Thambert, Andreas Gedin, Joachim Granit, Fia Palmgren, Robert Stasinski

Färgfabriken’s project Psychosis is an extensive long-term project intended to illuminate the human psyche trough a series of exhibitions, publications, seminars and film screenings. 

With I is Someone Else, we want to make an exhibition that is less concerned with artistic authenticity or diagnosed psychosis and more with the symptoms of the disease as a starting point to tell about the transformations of the self. Nor is a healthy person constituted by a clearly defined self, but we harbor a whole set of possible selves. This is clearly expressed in everyday language: we are “beyond ourselves”, it is claimed that “I was not myself”, that “I lost myself in thought” and so on.

A similar view of the possibility of multiple identities is expressed in a package insert for an antidepressant medication. As a side effect, the medicated person may suffer from the experience of “being separated from oneself and reality”. Where do you think you are then? And if you are not “being yourself”, then who are you? And hearing voices within can indeed be a symptom of illness, but under certain circumstances it is considered completely normal, for example if we hear them during awakening in the borderland between dream and wakefulness. And those who claim to hear God’s voice within them are rarely declared ill for this very reason. The boundaries between what is normal and abnormal are obviously unclear, impressionable and negotiable.

We think that works of art can be perceived as symptoms, as “psychotic” without being an expression of illness. They can both construct temporary, whole selves and dissolve the experience of a solid identity. Or they may simply raise unanswered questions about the nature of the self. And the artworks in the exhibition are not psychotic because they communicate with the viewers and create the dialogue that the sick person lacks the opportunity for.

Elsa Ekesiöö Thambert, Andreas Gedin, Joachim Granit, Fia Palmgren, Robert Stasinski

Catalogue