iArts year one invites you to visit “Unforbidden”, an exhibition with psychiatry and psychology as its focal point. The students have viewed the Unhinged and Off-Comics exhibition at museum Dr.Guislain, Ghent, and L’événement d’être là at museum Trinkhall, Liege. In response to this, the students have conducted artistic and theoretical research, which has resulted in a collection of artworks expressing their findings.  Through these diverse artworks they invite you to contemplate the complexities of the human mind, offering unique perspectives on emotion, cognition and identity. 

We look forward to welcoming you!

Opening night: Friday 26th of April, 17.00 - 20.00, works will be visible until Sunday 5th of May, at Museum Dr. Guislain

Five young people, tutors, an attic and objects from the past: what happens when rules fall away, freedom has free rein and stopping can lead to starting again?

The creative journey starts with archive objects, but soon expands to other objects, spaces, statements or own stories as starting points for new creations. In complete freedom, collaborations emerge, experimentation, isolation and stopping to start again. The expo is therefore the result of a diversity of personal stories.

We make Fioretti comes about thanks to the collaboration between Museum Dr Guislain and Fioretti, the children's and youth department of Guislain Hospital. The young people are supervised by artist Karolien Soete. This falls under the project ErfGoedVoelen, in which heritage objects are used in the care sector.

Want to soak up the atmosphere? See the video: "We make Fioretti"

Fashion, as a cultural phenomenon is more than societal convention. Through one’s clothes and garments one can show the world an image of who one is, and how one wants to be perceived. As such, clothes have a deep symbolical meaning. Specifically, in the interspace between daily society and mad reality, they can help express our identity, form a second skin that protects us for the gaze of others, and at the same time communicate our deepest sense of self.

Over the past months, the first-year students of Maastricht Academy of Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Programme researched the topic of ‘Mirror Mirror’ for their exhibition ‘Veiled Wardrobe’, (un)dressing body and mind. They studied the exhibitions at Museum Dr. Guislain as well as Liège’s Trinkhall Museum to uncover different approaches to the topic of madness and fashion. The overarching topic of their reflective talks was the de-stigmatisation of people with mental illnesses. The surrealist movement posed as the catalyst of their exploration of the topic and tickled their imagination. Following this interdisciplinary approach, their ideas and concepts culminated in a collection of artistic transdisciplinary visual works.

21-04-2023 at 16:00-20:00 opening with performance

Music is a passion, a way out of boredom and darkness. Music brings life, makes you dream of distant horizons. In 2020 Peter Hoebeke (1969) together with Sammy Van Cauteren (1974) started a series of self-portraits. The theme is Hoebeke himself, his red guitar and an amplifier. With this equipment they went to locations that determined his life: the square of Geraardsbergen, where Hoebeke was born; the station of Gent-Sint Pieters, where he used to take the train as a student; the harbor area where he worked; Caritas where he was a resident during 12 months; the bike workshop where he worked as a volunteer after his illness…

The images tell us about the past and the future, about the art of balancing between the two, searching for a balance between what has passed and what is still about to come. The closing of a chapter of life.

De Windstoot
About the power of limitation

At the end of 2019 non-profit organization Wit.h started a new Art Expeditie: De Windstoot, about the power of limitation. The title refers to a work of Léon Spilliaert representing a young girl at the sea’s edge. She is hanging on the railing of the quay and stares at the horizon. She screams her lungs out. There is a strong wind; however the silence is deafening. De Windstoot is about equivalence, about having power and feeling powerlessness, about giving people a voice in general and giving a voice to artists in particular.

For this new Art Expeditie the non-profit organization Wit.h collaborated with a huge number of international and selected artists who created new work in small groups. They were inspired by the theme of the Ship of Fools and the social topic of power versus powerlessness. Museum Dr. Guislain is responsible for the presentation of the final results. Everything is shown in a museum context and in connection with our own collection. De Windstoot is the result of a collective collaboration spread through time: the contemporary and participative artistic practice goes hand in hand with the public-oriented dynamic of the museum.

A publication goes with the exhibition and there will be a wide range of accessible public activities.

The image representation is the result of a cocreation of Lara Breine and Lien Anckaert. For this work the artists were inspired by the eponymous work of Léon Spilliaert.

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

For Balayer – A Map of Sweeping (v.2018), the British artist Imogen Stidworthy visited Jacques Lin and Gisèle Durand's community in Monoblet. They were part of the ‘network’ that Fernand Deligny began in the Cévennes, in the south of France, to take care of children with complex problems, most of whom were on the autistic spectrum and non-verbal. The emphasis was on experimentation: he created a small community in stark contrast to life in an institution, replacing institutional isolation with living with others in the countryside. The adults had no special training, and withdrew from spoken language when with the children. Deligny created an environment in which aids such as maps, photography and film, took the place of language. These helped the adults ‘to see’, to catch traces of meaning in the gestures and ‘wandering lines’ of the children; they were also tools for shaping relationship with them.

When the network ended in the mid-1980s, Jacques Lin and Gisèle Durand continued to live with three of the children from the network, Janmari Jonquet (d. 2005), Gilou Toche and Christoph Berton, all of whom were autistic and non-verbal. In the installation, audio and video footage made by Stidworthy over several visits to their community in Monoblet in 2014, is brought into dialogue with Jacques Lin’s footage shot between 2000 and 2008. The gestures and activities of Gisèle Durand, Gilou Toche and Christoph Berton are observed in moving images, as intimate observations of the daily rhythm of the contemporary community and embodied traces of the network.

In Balayer – A Map of Sweeping projected images and spatialised voices evoke a landscape of different forms of language. Gisèle Durand describes the ‘wandering lines’ in a map she made in 1971, which shows the movements of Janmari and an adult sweeping the kitchen floor. It was one of hundreds of maps, or ‘tracings’, made by the adults, of the children’s movements, and a regular practice in the life of the network. Deligny’s commentary on the map and fragments of other writings are heard in ‘live’ translation into English, and projected as text in the original French. In another projected text we follow two stories told by Jacques Lin about Janmari, while in the videos we see Janmari, Gilou and Christoph filmed in timeframes up to fourteen years apart, as we cut between Stidworthy’s and Lin’s footage. Between these two viewpoints and different layers of time, daily rythms, gestures and movements, emerge as embodied forms of non-verbal language and relationship.

For one year, the Dr. Guislain Museum will be drawing inspiration from the French educationalist, philosopher, writer, film-maker and artist Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). Deligny’s approach to care, upbringing and social work is based on fundamental criticism of the intention to improve and change people. From 12 February 2022, the exhibition Circonstances, with a selection of maps, photos and excerpts from the film Ce gamin, là, makes way for Imogen Stidworthy’s Balayer – A Map of Sweeping.  The Deligny studio, which Simon Allemeersch is shaping together with young people from the Ghent psychiatric community,  continues to grow and evolve. The question 'How can Deligny's ideas inspire us today?' will be central throughout the year.

From the collections:
Collectie De Stadshof Foundation and the Dr. Guislain Museum

Art is an essential part of life. It touches us, stimulates our imagination and makes us reflect about mankind and society. Because of its virtuosity and expressiveness, art can be shamelessly beautiful and evoke a sense of awe.

Contemporary museums exhibit work by professional artists. Few museums focus on collecting and exhibiting work from original talents, people who did not get the opportunity to study art or who are not part of the regular art circuit for one reason or another. They are usually artistic loners, nonconformists, who make unorthodox choices in terms of the materials and techniques they use. Their motifs are often personal. Their works are intense and unique.

The Cabinets provides a platform for ‘solitary creators’ whose work will be arranged in changing presentations: recent acquisitions are exhibited, vulnerable works are returned to the depot and new themes are addressed.

The Cabinets is a collaboration between the Collectie De Stadshof Foundation and the Dr. Guislain Museum. It presents works of some thirty different artists.

The Museum Dr. Guislain’s collection started off with a small collection of visual art created by artistically-gifted psychiatric patients and mentally challenged persons. In 2002, the collection in Ghent expanded tremendously with the internationally acclaimed collection of De Stadshof Collection Foundation, which is on long term loan. This top-of-the-bill collection – from naïve art to art brut – has more than 6,000 pieces by nearly 400 outsider artists such as A.C.M., Herman Bossert, Nek Chand, Paul Duhem, Luiz Figueiredo, Madge Gill, Siebe Wiemer Glastra, Bertus Jonkers, Pavel Leonov, Bonaria Manca, Markus Meurer, Michel Nedjar, Oswald Tschirtner, Willem van Genk, and August Walla.