Opening Reception 6pm Thursday 17 November

Facing It – Imaging Madness is part of the Mère Folle Project by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker. The project constitutes an attempt to offer museum and gallery visitors experiences they don’t ordinarily have. In a combination of shock, pleasure, strangeness and beauty, they will make a journey through ‘madness’, rather than sitting in front of the screen, as in the cinema. It is aimed at people interested in video art, unusual narratives, and uncommon audio-visual sensations ‘ and mental illness.

This is a project of multiple video installations through which the idea of ‘madness’ is given a variety of interpretations. It is an experiment in audio-visual story-telling. Distinct from cinema, in the installation the ‘second-person’, the visitor, is in charge of making the stories through their own itinerary and combination of stories, portraits, and scenes on view. At Broadcast the Space In-Between, Watching the News, Sissi Outside, Landscapes of Madness, Office Hours, Sissi’s Treatment will be shown.

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her interests range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture, and madness. Her many books include Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (2010), Loving Yusuf (2008), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition 2009). She is also a video-artist, making experimental documentaries on migration. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.

This show is in association with in|discussion a Dublin Institute of Technology forum to discuss contemporary issues and current research in typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, society and technology. Updates on the lecture series at: http://indiscussionadp.blogspot.com/