Christopher Payne, Eddo Hartmann, Robert Garcet/Juul Sadée/Ralph Noort and Peter Granser
‘This is where my house lives*’
The Dr. Guislain Museum, Gent
16.6.2012 - 16.9.2012
Five variations on living and madness The Dr. Guislain Museum uses its own special architecture as a source of inspiration for the presentation of five variations on the theme ‘living and madness’. How do people treat psychiatric architectural heritage? And how has ‘living and madness’ inspired artists and outsiders?
Christopher Payne
Asylums. Inside the closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Large psychiatric institutions, considered the ultimate answer to the issue of madness in centuries past, now seem strange and lost. In 2009 Christopher Payne (New York, USA) depicted in photographs the large, abandoned psychiatric institutions in the United States, and did so with exceptional precision: in search of signs of habitation, domesticity and intimacy in the abandoned, mastodon architectural style. UR Architects document the similarities with and differences from the situation in our own country.
Peter Granser
J’ai perdu ma tête (‘I lost my head’)
This series of photographs by Peter Granser (Stuttgart, Germany) form a report on his visit to a psychiatric institution in Normandy. The photographer sets out in search of traces of life in the anonymous hospital environment. A hole in a wall, drawings on the floor, an unmade bed: signs of making a place one’s own.
Eddo Hartmann
Hier woont mijn huis (‘This is where my house lives’)
Eddo Hartmann (Amsterdam, Netherlands) allows visitors to bear witness to the remarkable condition in which he found his parent’s home: a disconcerting combination of style and the unraveling of life.
Robert Garcet - Juul Sadée - Ralph Noort
Scale 1:200, a triptych
During the course of his life (1912-2001) Robert Garcet (Eben Ezer) designed a strange tower: the most imposing and famous folly in Belgian architecture. A giant model of this will be exhibited, together with artworks from the tower. Juul Sadée interweaves the concepts and work of Robert Garcet with her own work and that of Ralph Noort into a ‘situation’. In this respect, their joint point of departure is: rencontrer, penser, créer (‘meet, think, create’).
This is where my house lives: outsiders on ‘living and madness’
When it comes to the theme of ‘from house and home to homelessness’, outsider artists are all inspired in their own ways.
*after the words of Wouter De Ryck, cousin of the visual artist Anne-Mie van Kerkhoven.
© Peter Granser