Spectacular Evidence: Theatres of the Observed Mind is a one-day symposium that draws upon histories of madness, its exhibition and how it has been staged as cultural performance. Spectacular Evidence will also explore the behaviours and ‘performances’ acted out in the relationship between patient and physician. Proposals with a connection to the subject area of the symposium are invited from professionals, staff, researchers and research students.
Convened by Zoë Mendelson, in partnership with Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School, this event includes performances, screenings and talks. It brings together representatives from visual arts, medicine and critical theory to produce contemporary psycho-cultural readings of performances integral to psychiatric space, practice and histories.
Zoë is an artist whose work straddles Fine Art and Medical Humanities, engaging with disorder as a culturally produced phenomenon, in parallel to its clinical counterpart. She is currently Course Leader for BA Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts.
Confirmed contributors include:
- Zoe Beloff – Artist. Her exhibition The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society celebrated the centennial of Freud’s visit to Coney Island
- Dr Anna Harpin – Author of Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
- Dr Joanne Morra – Reader in Art History and Theory, Central Saint Martins. Founder and principal editor, Journal of Visual Culture. Morra’s recent book, Inside the Freud Museum (forthcoming IB Tauris)
- Florence Peake – Artist. Her performance practice combines her extensive training in dance and background in painting
- Dr Michelle Williams Gamaker – Artist, filmmaker and collaborator with Mieke Bal on the film A Long History of Madness (2011)
The event will take place at ArtsAdmin in London on Friday 24 March 2017, starting at 11am.
Proposals
Proposals are welcome from across disciplines and should have a connection to the subject area covered by the symposium. They can be for traditional presentations, performative contributions or variations on the lecture form. Presentations should be no more than 20 minutes in duration.
The deadline for proposals is 17.00, Tuesday 10 January 2017. Please submit here.
For more information please contact Zoë Mendelson.