Landscapes of Madness

The Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum present the large-scale media installation Landscapes of Madness, by cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal and video artist and writer Michelle Williams Gamaker. The exhibition forms part of the international Mère Folle project, combining films, art and scientific research. The exhibition is on display at Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova in Turku, Finland from October 21st 2011 until January 29th 2012. During the exhibition, the University of Turku will arrange a lecture and the Finnish premiere of the feature-length film A Long History of Madness (2011) by Bal and Williams Gamaker. Landscapes of Madness is curated by art historian Mia Hannula (University of Turku).

Landscapes of Madness portrays how crisis – caused by war and traumatic experience – can affect the human mind and our social relations, as well as how madness is conceived and understood. The exhibition brings forth several types of madness and explores their historically and culturally bound meanings where reality and fiction, present and past, and the worlds of the ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ are intertwined. The viewers are lured into a mock trial whose jury consists of medieval fools and 20th century thinkers, then onto the stages of court jesters, further to a landscape scarred by war and, finally, into the office of psychoanalysts from different times and places.

The multifaceted audiovisual installation draws its inspiration and material from the film A Long History of Madness (2011), an international collaborative project based on the book Mère Folle (1998) by French psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine, who plays herself in the film. In an earlier form, the production was presented as a part of the Madness and Arts Festival in Haarlem, the Netherlands in 2010, and has since been exhibited internationally. Installations using and reworking the film’s content have been presented in venues such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The media installation at the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum consists of videos, photographs, objects and texts. Some of the footage in the video pieces was filmed in Turku in 2009. The Turku Archipelago and the cityscape, as well as locations like hospitals and a mediaeval market, are vividly displayed in the works. The video material was also filmed in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Switzerland. The actors speak in their mother tongue, thus the soundtracks comprise 12 different languages. Objects from the film come to life in the exhibition space, including those borrowed from the island of Seili, one of the locations. The photographs in the exhibition are taken by, among others, Finnish photographer Markus Karjalainen.

Artists

Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, part of international filmmaking collective Cinema Suitcase, fulfilled various roles, including designing the artistic media installation, authoring the screenplay and shooting, editing and producing the film. Their art, research projects, documentaries and films offer an interdisciplinary approach whose aim is to foster international cultural collaboration.

Mieke Bal (Netherlands), a cultural theorist and critic, is a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor. She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her interests range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. She is well known for developing methodologies for cultural analysis and interdisciplinary research. Her many books include Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (2010), Loving Yusuf (2008), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition 2009). In addition to her extensive academic research she works as an independent curator and video-artist making experimental documentaries.

Films by Mieke Bal have been presented all around the world at film festivals and art exhibitions www.miekebal.org

Michelle Williams Gamaker (UK) is a video and performance artist and writer. Her work varies from single-frame portraits and installations to complex renderings of reality via documentary and fiction. The subtle and sublime potential of storytelling through the everyday is at the root of her work. Her video work was first recognized in 2001 at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Since then she has exhibited internationally. She taught on the MFA Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she recently completed her PhD dissertation entitled The Relocation of Art Experience: Therapeutic Negotiation and Social Interrelations in Art Practice. She lives in Amsterdam, where she works as an artist and performance tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com

Exhibition curator

Mia Hannula (Finland) is an art historian and researcher. She has studied art history and political science. Hannula has worked as an assistant lecturer at the department of Art History at the University of Turku. She has held several courses and lectures on contemporary art and theory, and worked as an independent curator. Mia Hannula has published articles on contemporary art, migratory aesthetics, and aesthetics of conflict imagery and violence. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled Towards an Intercultural Aesthetic: Cultural Conflicts and Encounters in Contemporary Relational Art and Experimental Documentaries.

For more information about the project:  please visit www.crazymothermovie.com

Events in Turku

The exhibition coincides with a lecture Imagining Madness on Friday October 21st, organised by the University of Turku and presented by Mieke Bal, former Academy professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and internationally renowned cultural theorist. Theoretical fields central to her research are anaslysis of visual culture, narratology, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, museum studies, feminist and postcolonial theory. She is well known for developing methodologies for cultural analysis and interdisciplinary research. The lecture is followed by the Finnish premiere of the film A Long History of Madness (2011).

In addition to the exhibition, lecture and film premiere, a section presenting the recent research by Bal and Williams Gamaker will be on show at the Turku Library (Turun kaupunginkirjasto) in January 2012. An exhibition catalogue edited by curator Mia Hannula will be launched, featuring articles written by Hannula, Mieke Bal, Michelle Wiliams Gamaker and Françoise Davoine, along with the expert contributions of researcher Anna Helena Klumpen and Spanish art historian Miguel A. Hernández Navarro. A two-disc special edition DVD of A Long History of Madness (2011) will also be released.

The exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Helsinki, Turku University and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, and executed in co-operation with the Archipelago Research Institute in Turku. During spring 2012, part of the Landscapes of Madness exhibition continues at Galleri Kakelhallen in Mariehamn, the capital of the Åland Islands.

Imagining Madness
Lecture and Finnish premiere of the film A Long History of Madness on Friday 21.10.2011

from 12.15 until 2pm
Mieke Bal: From After-Images to Inter-Images: Madness as the Last Frontier
Janus-Auditorium. IIPC Debate 25. Art Studies, Kaivokatu 12, University of Turku

from 2–4pm lunch
 

from 4–4.45 pm
Michelle Williams Gamaker:
Reciprocal Propositions – the artist as corporeal and theoretical mediator
PharmaCity, Itäinen Pitkäkatu 4, auditorium, University of Turku
 

at 5pm
The movie A Long History of Madness (2011)
PharmaCity, Itäinen Pitkäkatu 4, auditorium, University of Turku

Discussion after the screening

The lectures and the premiere are free and do not recuire prior registration