Mad Building
Syndrome (MBS)
With works by Hannah Hull, Agata Mrozowski, Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam and Rupali Mozaria, ariella tai, Joe Wood, and contributions by Kelly Schieder
Curated by Sajdeep Soomal
17 January – 22 February 2020
Opening Reception: Friday 17 January 6-8PM
Trinity Square Video
121-401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
Co-presented with Workman Arts
In the 1950s, the psychiatric establishment neatly assembled its shaky ideas about the human mind, diagnostic categories, legal and moral stature, and treatment plans in a holy book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The manual armed psychiatry’s willful adherents with a gospel to contain and control the insane. Joining hands with burgeoning chemical corporations obsessed with maximizing profits like Bayer, Pfizer, and Merck, psychiatry added pill-based treatment to its reformist program starting in the 1960’s. Under the new rubric of biochemical psychiatry, madness was an internal problem – the product of chemically-imbalanced, malfunctioning brains.
As depression became the diagnosis of the day in the 1990’s and diagnostic rates of anxiety sky-rocketed in the 2010's, BigPharma consolidated its hold over psychiatry. It is not incidental that the rise of biochemical psychiatry has paralleled the neoliberalization of the economy. If neoliberal governance in North America has reduced the individual down to their productive mind, then contemporary psychiatry and neoliberal self-care have functioned to sedate that mind into submission. In other words, psychiatric pharmaceuticals vacuate the people of their revolutionary, world-building potential. Psychiatry routinely turns our freedom fighters – the anorexic child, the hysteric woman, the schizophrenic protestor or the psychotic worker – into sedated scarecrows designed to demarcate the psychic bounds of settler colonial society and warn off detractors. Biochemical psychiatry not only ignores the environmental surround that drives us mad in the first place, but aims to mold us into the straitjacket that is neoliberal colonial capitalism.
Mad Building Syndrome (MBS) proposes a different route. It tells us that madness is the product of a broken world, a normal bodily reaction to unhealthy living conditions and toxic environments. Familiar with the dangers of psychiatry, those afflicted with Mad Building Syndrome (MBS) let their minds flow through sanity and insanity to speak truth to insensible power. The culprits appear everywhere: psychiatric institutions run by settler police states, family homes ruined by patriarchy, language twisted upon itself, the world arranged by capital. Within this unending matrix of power, those freedom fighters driven by Mad Building Syndrome (MBS) have rightly decided to stake out and build new, free worlds for themselves.
Presented at Trinity Square Video (TSV) in Toronto, Canada from January to February 2020, the exhibition Architecture after the Asylum featured works by artists afflicted with Mad Building Syndrome (MBS). Presenting an open dialogue about the architectural forms of asylums, psychiatric hospitals and mental health institutions that flows through sanity and insanity, the curatorial project assembles a new set of mad architectural grammars to build a free world.
The exhibition opens with “Madlove: A Designer Asylum,” a long-term collaborative research project by Hannah Hull and the vacuum cleaner (James Leadbitter). Started in 2014, the UK-based duo decided to imagine what a psychiatric ward would be like if patients designed it. Through interviews and workshops, the duo gathered data about “what good mental health looks like, feels like, tastes like and sounds like” in order to design extravagant, out-of-the-box safe spaces to go mad. With a room made of red pillows and umbrellas hanging from the ceiling, the speculative installations are compelling rebukes of the contemporary “relaxed, open environment” rhetoric that is shaping new psychiatric builds. In the gallery, small vignettes from the workshops are presented with take-away “Pocket Asylum” booklets.
In the centre of the gallery, artist Joe Wood presents their two-part project “ᐦᐹᑌᔨᑖᑯᓯᐃᐧᐣ | kohpâteyitâkosiwin — the act of being thought of as contemptible.” For one element, Wood marks-up and displays medical documents about her "gender dysphoria” that she requisitioned from The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) –a psychiatric hospital located in Toronto where she spent time as a youth. Confronting the pile of notes, she notes that it felt like “a file on my life.” Pinning up the paperwork along an unending white wall, the public signage is a powerful rebuke of settler psychiatry. Her words can be read sitting from a sculptural installation of tree tops. As the state moved her through different foster homes and psychiatric institutions, Joe Wood recalls that she would always find a tree to climb. For Joe, it was the architecture of the land that made possible her survivance. Joe sculpts justice out of injustice to present us with a sprawling tree in the centre of the exhibition. It is a safe place to rest our minds.
But it is not always easy to rest in and around the municipally-governed trees of Toronto — especially if you are homeless. In “The Right to Sleep,” landscape architect student and Parkdale Community Drop-In Worker Agata Mrozowski considers the relationship between homelessness and wellness against the maddening housing crisis in Toronto. Through stories, meals, and site visits, Mrozowski works with Patrick Richmond and Richard Howard to recount and render the spaces that the two inhabited in order to find shelter while homeless. Together, the works call attention to the way the urban landscape is reinterpreted, reappropriated, and repurposed beyond its intended function in the name of survival, autonomy and sleep.
In the first work, a series of rotating architectural drawings of U-Haul vehicles depicts both the disruptive nature of seeking shelter in a different vehicle every night and the benefits of bypassing the turmoil of the shelter system. PR remarks that, “jumping through so many hurdles of the system, I would get discouraged. But staying here [at the U-Haul site] I could see the light a little bit.”
The second piece, a sectional perspective drawing, showcases RH’s architectural ingenuity. It highlights RH’s use of found objects to construct an encampment that endured the elements for four seasons. “When the cops came they were so impressed. You could stand in it,” said RH. “I showed up one day and it was levelled. They cut down five trees to clear me out.” As climate chaos makes the weather more erratic and extreme, the brutal municipal ritual of levelling encampments continues to make people both homeless and criminal, leaving them with no place to go. Rather than mapping out the complex web of power that destroyed his home, RH moves forward by building a new place to sleep and rest their mind. “[The cops] are not stopping me,” RH says steadfast, “I’m already working on another one.”
Through two digital video works, Portland-based media artist ariella tai considers how we might cleanse our well-rested minds. “not alone” by ariella tai re-arranges narrative in the 2003 psychiatric horror film Gothika. Starring Halle Berry, the film follows the story of a psychiatrist who finds herself trapped in a women’s mental health hospital after she is accused of killing her husband. In this re-telling of the film, imperatives around black femme labor and obligation are stripped away to make room for a cleansing rage. Starting on the cold tiles of the asylum’s open showers, tai re-appropriates, glitches, and re-mixes scenes to return Halle Berry back to her private bathtub so that she can have some peace of mind.
tai continues with the space of the bathroom in their latest work “safehouse ii” to materially consider how bathing enters into the ordinary, day-to-day work of cleansing bodies, souls and minds. We watch two people living autonomously as they garden, cook and bathe playfully around the house. As the video unfolds, the viewer is presented with black queer and trans performances that subvert, interrupt or defy the diegetic cohesiveness of narrative performance that psychiatry demands of its subjects.
In “How we cared,” Saroja Ponnambalam returns to her late uncle Pandi’s archives, reinterpreting the multiple systems of care in his life, over which he had varying levels of autonomy. Working with graphic artist Rupali Mozaria, she presents an expanded schematic of forced care, natural forms of care and creative care. The three sites operate within a fluid and un-determined ecosystem that implicates a number of actors spanning the healthcare/medical world to the spiritual/natural. The schematic attempts to move away from finite solutions to healing medically diagnosed disorders.
The Toronto-based artists invite viewers to take a step back from conventional architectural practices that use speculative methods to conjure up imaginary built environments for psychiatric subjects, and to question the extent to which these practices are grounded in the lived experience of the people and communities for whom these spaces are designed. In a durational performance that spanned several weeks, the artists added layers of images, objects and text to complicate and unfold the story of each care site.
Making forays in and out of madness, the works collectively propose new bricks and mortar, new blueprints and new ways of building a less-Enlightened world. The building blocks are sleep, freedom, tree climbing, eating, bathing, filmmaking, playing, breathing, and truth-telling.
Reviews
Hiba Ali, “Review: Architecture after the Asylum,” published in Issue 146 of C Magazine
Shauna Jean Doherty, “Review: Architecture after the Asylum,” published in Akimbo
Public Programs
Friday 17 January 2020 – Opening Night Reception
Saturday 01 February 2020 – The Visual Language of Psychiatry, workshop by Sajdeep Soomal
10 – 21 February 2020 – Artist Residency with ariella tai, hosted by VTape
Tuesday 18 February 2020 – The Cinematic Archive of Mad Blackness, talk by ariella tai, hosted by VTape
Thursday 20 February 2020 – Artist Talk by Saroja Ponnambalam and Rupali Morzaria
Architecture after the Asylum is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
Trinity Square Video
401 Richmond Street West, suite 121
Toronto ON M5V 3A8
416.593.1332
info@trinitysquarevideo.com
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Trinity Square Video is an accessible venue.
Hannah Hull is a situation-specific artist, creating social sculpture and political interventions. Her work is often dialogue-based and temporal. As part of her practice, she delivers and consults on creative practice for social change, through her practice-based PhD, for which she has a studentship at Goldsmiths, University of London with the Institute of Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship.
Rupali Morzaria is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary designer and film programmer. Her creative practice is rooted in traditional forms of graphic communication and print media, repurposing the ‘dazzle’ of consumerist culture to critically engage with what is often left unsaid. Rupali’s fascination turned obsession with Indian Cinema has manifested itself in the ongoing film series called Sanghum at the Royal Theater, and an upcoming film program of Indian experimental and animated shorts with Pleasure Dome.
Agata Mrozowski has worked as a Community Mental Health Worker in the community of Parkdale for the past 13 years. She is also currently completing her masters of Landscape Architecture at U of T. She is interested in stories that fall out of dominant narratives of western Progress. She originally hails from Stalowa Wola, Poland prior to settling on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Métis Nation, the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations where she has spent most of her life. She is working collaboratively with Patrick Richmond and Richard Howard on the project.
Saroja Ponnambalam is an Ontario-based filmmaker with latinx and south-asian roots well-versed in critical geography, participatory media and documentary. Her independent arts practice involves working with a variety of media within the spectrum of documentary – animation, photographs, home video, and interviews. She holds a Master of Arts in Human Geography from University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production from York University.
ariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television and media studies. They are one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of black women and femmes in film, video and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Boathouse Microcinema, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA and Smack Mellon.
Joe Wood was born in Nelson House MB, is a member of South Indian Lake First Nation, and identifies as Cree and Scottish. Joe is a self-taught visual and media artist who was raised as disabled. Her artistic practice has been a way to release anger, probe the unknown, and to express herself as a two spirit person. Whether painting, drawing with charcoal, or working with digital tools, Joe fearlessly pushes boundaries through her thoughtfully composed, minimalist aesthetic. For four years, Joe has been a core member of Art Fix of Nipissing – a collective of artists with lived experience of mental health and substance use – contributing to project development, the design of our annual zine, and juried exhibitions.