In her work, a series of photographs entitled The Reinvention of Hysteria: Iconography from the Salpêtrière Hospital (work in progress), Tejal Shah deals with the idea of the reinvention of Professor Jean-Mar tin Charcot’s notion of hysteria. In the late-19th century, Dr Charcot established the first photo laboratory within Paris’ famous Pitié-Salp êtrière hospital. The artist reconstructed situations, and took photos of hysteria in the manner of Charcot. This work critically deals with historical and social constructs, one of which is so-called female hysteria.
In the light of the bizarre and the surreal, Myriam Laplante’s work sets before us a circus and the comic theatre of life, which could make us »laugh out loud« if she wasn’t playing in profound seriousness. Projecting an image of the world through the personification of mythological or fictional characters, Laplante’s performances create a space of opposition in which she tries to accommodate the misleading promises of fairytales and her own entanglements with reality, where different – or no – rules apply. Drawing on Grimm’s tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, the performance Lupus in Fabula significantly takes off from the original story, turning the image of mother the saviour into mother the destroyer of the world she herself creates. The no-longer innocent spectator is invited to enjoy the transformed leftovers of the hour-long »massacre«. The sculptural work Neurons, uses the idea of the irreplaceable and most essential cell of the nervous system – responsible for processing and transmitting information – to comment on the malfunctioning of the brains of world leaders…
