Personal Space
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For my MFA final exhibition, at the Gothenburg Konsthall, I decided to address the topics that affected me the most, and thus, felt the most urgency to share with a public. To do this, the technicians of the Konsthall helped me build two spaces: a waiting room and a bedroom.
These two spaces housed two different enquiries, both related to the concepts of immigration, mental health, and performativity.
In the first space, methods of waiting and treating mental health were presented by an encounter with some generic elements that are often found in medical offices. These elements were used by and interacted with by the people who entered and were carefully assembled to guide the eyes of each viewer to a screen.
The video playing in said screen looks to examine how one of the most successful Swedish mental health service providers operates, by using the aesthetic of their existing online courses to propose a new one: a six-module (thirteen-minute) lesson on screaming as a method for self-help.
After finishing their interaction with the waiting room, guests could enter the bedroom one at a time, and were then confronted by a new set of elements, ones which I personally interacted with during the two-year program.
In the bedroom, each person could see a looping documentation of 70 daily, self-guided, cognitive behavioral therapy experiments, playing simultaneously in one image, while surrounded by the sounds and the voices taken from some of the sessions. Purposefully obscure, the bedroom was only illuminated by the projection and a single UV light which interacted with two paintings by literally highlighting their textures.
For the complete installation to be interacted with as smoothly as possible, an instruction manual was placed at the beginning of it, which was made of vinyl (the most common format for displaying texts in art galleries).
Final Exam Portfolio_Ricardo Diaque_PDF
