Forum Expanded 2012: Critique and Clinic

Organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art as part of the Berlinale.

This year’s Forum Expanded exhibition at the Kunstsaele Berlin is entitled “Critique and Clinic”. Criticism of institutions and clinical psychiatry in particular played a central role in the political discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, a movement which regarded psychological pathologies as a product of social conditions and the repressive structures of society. Luke Fowler’s film All Divided Selves, which explores the work of psychiatrist and guru of the anti-psychiatry movement RD Laing, forms the starting point for “Critique and Clinic”. The works shown in the exhibition take an in-depth look at the current psychological dimensions of socio-political structures. By examining the relationship between mental states and global structures, the exhibition offers a diagnostic panorama of the “psychospheres” of a form of capitalism which has made life, subjectivity and the psyche into a central resource. Much like the rest of this year’s Forum Expanded programme, the exhibition also raises the question of art’s scope for taking action in both visual and narrative terms.

Artists: Heike Baranowsky (Germany), Duncan Campbell (Ireland), Luke Fowler (GB), Iram Ghufran (India), Virlani Hallberg und Jennifer Rainsford (Sweden), Ken Jacobs (USA), Steffen Köhn und Paola Calvo (Germany), Eline McGeorge (Norway), The Otolith Group (GB), Florian Wüst (Germany)