We are excited to kick off the new year at the TRU with an announcement about an upcoming exhibition curated by TRU member Sajdeep Soomal. Architecture After the Asylum opens this Friday, January 17 at Trinity Square Video. Co-presented by Workman Arts, the exhibition explores the concept of Mad Building Syndrome—a term that plays on Sick Building Syndrome to move beyond the physical illnesses our surroundings can produce and into the psychic responses to environment that drive people insane.
Mad Building Syndrome (MBS) proposes that madness is the product of a broken world, a normal biological reaction to unhealthy living conditions and toxic environments. The culprits are everywhere: psychiatric institutions run by settler governments, basement offices turned moldy from corporate negligence, family homes ruined by patriarchy. It is an indictment of the built environment that we have inherited and its defenders; an indictment of an Enlightened world designed with the objective to contain and control.
Working against the dominant trajectories of psychiatric history and the assumptions underpinning biochemical psychiatry, Architecture After the Asylum offers an avenue through which to imagine new worlds outside this maddening one. The exhibition features works by Hannah Hull, Agata Mrozowski, Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam and Rupali Mozaria, ariella tai, Joe Wood, with contributions by Kai Cheng Thom, Joshua Whitehead, and Kelly Schieder. The artists and writers included in the exhibition and its related programming are world-builders who identify with MBS and the possibilities of new worlds that it contains.
Don’t forget to check out the public programming running in parallel with the exhibition. Saturday, February 01 – The Visual Language of Psychiatry workshop by Sajdeep Soomal
Thursday, February 13 – Performance by Joe Wood
Thursday, February 13 – Joshua Whitehead in conversation with Kai Cheng Thom
10 – 21 February – Artist Residency with Ariella Tai, hosted by VTape
More information about the exhibition and related programs can be found on Trinity Square Video’s website.
Technoscience Research Unit 