JURAPLATZ, 2024
Biel / Bienne, Switzerland
Biel / Bienne, Switzerland
Hysterical Material is a 2024 solo exhibition featuring a floating photogram sculpture, video works, and a custom neon sign. Each artwork was site specific in order to engage with the Bauhaus architecture of Juraplatz.
These now works turn away from the digital and return to my early practice of analogue photography. Referencing the impermanence of chromogenic images, Hysterical Material underscores the inherently unstable process of darkroom color printing and the incalculable effects of light leaks, color casts, and pesky dust particles.
As political theorist Anita Chari notes, “Hysteria has been one of the most studied of the psychological neuroses, from the early medical and photographic explorations of female hysterical patients by Charcot at the Salpetrière Hospital, to Sigmund Freud’s early work with Josef Breuer on hysterical patients…” The artworks in Hysterical Material do not present hysteria as a disease or pathological disorder bound to the female body, but rather an epistemology that can be prescribed to inanimate objects and currents environmental conditions. The hysteria of the material therefore resides in their act of imprinting or rather failure to - the action in which a positive becomes a negative - a registered absence.