DEVIATIONS*
text
by Miriam Bers
(...)
Anna Konik deals with socially marginalized groups in her installation
and video works. She films lonely, old, homeless or mentally ill people
who largely live in isolation from society. As a quiet observer, she
often takes the role of an accomplice. Her video installation Toys
(2000), on the other hand, is based on a longer cooperation with director
Katarzyna Winska in the form of an independent theater group in a
theatrical center in Warsaw. The center serves as kind of post –clinical
treatment, offering people suffering from schizophrenia a way to occupy
themselves during the day. Konik’s performance work with “patients”
does not contain conceretely therapeutic approaches, nor was it intended
to. Curiosity and interest in people who lived outside of our norms
and the opportunity to collaborate in the game attracted the artist
to this experiment. For this she created latex sculptures that represent
body fragments and left them to the patients. Toys consists of sculptures
and two video films in which the protagonists show both their everyday
lives and then their “play” with latex arms and legs.
In the latter, the actors behave in a significantly more unrestrained
way. Konik observed spontaneity, opening up and integration into group,
a condition very important to people with schizophrenia, as they often
suffer from symptoms like dispassion, apathy and withdrawal. Konik
found taht the players behaved like a mentally “healthy”
people. The psychiatrist Leo Navratil, longtime director of the Haus
der Künstler (Artists’ House) in the Gugging psychiatric
clinic, gives evidence to the importance of creativity in connection
with schizophrenia and its therapy. In various publications about
his patients and especially in the compendium Art Brut and Psychiatrie,
Navratil documents an important contribution of his patients to contemporary
art. Even the unconventional thinker Detlef B.Linke speculates on
creativity and psychological deviance – in the context of certain
brain peculiarities of the sort: “If one follows Dostoyevsky,
the great epileptic, with his assertion that the fact that a brain
is sick doesn’t change the reality that it brings to light,
then one would want to go a step further and say – for certain
creative processes, one could hardly understand that they could be
put into reality without a “deviation” in the brain.
(* text from the Catalogue Deviations, Gallery K&S a project by Akademie Schloss Solitude and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; curator-Miriam Bers)