No Sovereign Author
Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie
Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie is the result of a collaboration between the residents of La Fabrique du Pré, a Walloon psychiatric rehabilitation institution, and the two founding members of the artistic collective No Sovereign Author: Maroussia Prignot and Valerio Alvarez.
Having worked as psychologists and an occupational therapists for more than fifteen years, Prignot and Alvarez organize creative workshops to try to offer answers to simple but essential questions: Who are the holders of knowledge in psychiatry? How is this knowledge used? What role does photography play in the (re)production of related stereotypes?
For the presentation of Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie at the Museum Dr. Guislain, No Sovereign Author selected twenty-three of the boards created during these workshops. Framed photographic reproductions of them are shown alongside detail enlargements of other non-selected images.
Each original board of Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie is made up of a black-and-white photocopy of a double-page spread, chosen by a resident, from the Dictionnaire de la psychiatrie by French psychiatrist Jacques Postel, as well as additions made by him: handwritten inscriptions and/or images and texts cut from the eight volumes of a 1968 encyclopedia whose content is now obsolete: Les Clefs de la Connaissance.
With the remaining fragments of this dismembered encyclopedia, No Sovereign Author gave birth to a second series of images related to the field of psychiatry. These are presented at KIOSK from April 1 to June 4, 2023 in the exhibition Thematic Apperception Test: Tell Us a Story with a Beginning and an End.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by The Eyes Publishing to be launched in June 2023. For more information: www.theeyes.eu
Practical information:
Opening: 24.03.2023, 8 p.m
On view until 01.10.2023
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. / Saturday – Sunday, 1 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Museum Dr. Guislain: Jozef Guislainstraat 43B, 9000 Ghent
