Review of Salon Hystérique: La Petit Mort et La Grande Hystérie at Blacks

25/02/14

Salon Hystérique: La Petit Mort et La Grande Hystérie

A group art exhibition of hysteric feminisms

Curated by Gabriella Daris

Blacks Members Club, 67 Dean Street

21 January – 19 April 2014

In what seems to be a season of feminist art shows in private members’ clubs around London (this comes hot on the heels of 2Q13: Women Artists, Women Collectors, curated by Marcelle Joseph and Lydia Cowpertwait, at Lloyd’s Club last autumn), curator Gabriella Daris has brought together, in the sumptuous Georgian townhouse surroundings of Blacks on Dean Street, some high quality and enjoyable works exploring what it means to be a woman, to have a vagina and a womb, and to use these bodily parts both for the furthering of life as well as for personal pleasure. Of course, as the title suggests, the exhibition also explores the association of the womb with hysteria, from its origins, at the time of continental mind doctors such as Charcot and Freud, to its current day incarnation, perhaps more commonly associated with feminist emancipation and desire.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/review-salon-hysterique.aspx

Review of Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum

09/12/13

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

Freud Museum

10 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

In late-19th-century Paris, after decades of political upheaval and social unrest, and an era of neurasthenia, fainting spells, and “the vapours”, a new psychological illness took to the stage: hysteria (from the Greek hystero, meaning womb) was pronounced “the illness of the age” by the prominent journalist, novelist, and playwright Jules Claretie. Largely considered a female malady, it turned women into the focus for the expression of many millennial fears and anxieties. From the 1870s onwards, stories about hysterical patients filled the newspaper columns. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists, photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn to such an extent that Georges Didi-Huberman feels “nearly compelled to consider hysteria, insofar as it was fabricated at the Salpêtrière [hospital] in the last third of the 19th century, as a chapter in the history of art.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mad-bad-and-sad-women-and-the-mind-doctors