Les femmes nerveuses

Nervous Women: Two Centuries of Women and their Psychiatrists

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Éditeur: Lannoo Publishers (Acc) (16 janvier 2013)
• Langue: English
• ISBN-10: 9401403783

The Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent is a unique and prestigious museum with a vast collection on the history of psychiatry and an internationally acclaimed collection of outsider art. The museum also organises temporary exhibitions based on the fascination for the 'not-ordinary', where delusion and science, art and culture are exposed in a different way.

For centuries, women have been considered more ‘nervous’ than men, more susceptible to instability and mental illness, more often bothered by spirits and demons. But are they really more ‘mentally ill’?
In the 19th century some women seemed to go mad due to a lack of behavioural freedom. In the early 21st century some women actually seem to succumb to the burden of ‘freedom’. The image of demands imposed on them by society to have a successful career, look beautiful and lead an exciting social life sometimes seems to be too much. But is it really?

The exhibition presents seven patient-psychiatrist ‘couples’: a remarkable history of how society and psychiatry evolve, how certain syndromes such as hysteria are phenomena of their time and how our times provoke and endure new forms of disturbed behaviour.
Nervous women wants to feed the debate about the ‘specific’ position of women in psychiatry.Nervous women is an exhibition about mania, melancholia, weak nerves, theatrical tics, passionate love, self-mutilation, boredom, rebellion and self-starvation.

With work by, among others: Eric De Volder, Diane Arbus, Yayoi Kusama,  Tracey Emin, Delphine Boël, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Paul McCarthy, Kati Heck, Barbara Krüger, Cindy Sherman, Viviane Joakim, Markus Schinwald, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Madge Gill, Weegee, Gao Brothers, Lili Dujourie, Guerilla Girls, Alfons Mucha, Louise Bourgeois, Gertrude Schwyzer, Félicien Rops, Unica Zürn, Nobuyoshi Araki, Annie Sprinkle, Ann Huybens, Zoulika Bouabdellah, Eleanor Antin, Philip Huyghe, Elodie Antoine, Tracey Snelling, Shadi Ghadirian and Luc Tuymans.