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Radical Link: A New Community of Women, 1855–2020

Grantees
Michal Heiman
American University Museum, Washington DC
November 9–December 15, 2019
Exhibition Grant

Based on Sander Gilman’s book The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography (1976) and Diamond’s 1855 photographs of female patients at the Surrey County Asylum in England, Radical Link envisions the political, cultural, gendered, and psychic conditions of asylum-seekers. Traversing time, space, gender, race, and institutional practices of asylum, Heiman offers a new way to extend solidarity to those who engage in acts of resistance by creating a new community. It includes women who have been subjugated by the Surrey County Asylum in London and the San Servolo Asylum in Venice, asylum seekers, artists, activists, prosecutors, gatekeepers, and those who have suffered under the violence of racism and misogyny. Through the strategies of intervention and the use of archival materials, photographs, films, sound work, and her presence in the gallery, she generates the political, cultural, gendered, and psychic conditions of a potential “radical link.” The project raises questions about identity, human rights, women’s rights, and the possibility of “return.”

Michal Heiman, Mask: detail from “Plate 34” by Dr. Hugh W. Diamond, 1855, 2016.

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