Social Insecurity

Winner of the Frac Bretagne-Art Norac Prize 2024, Tania Gheerbrant presents a solo exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria.

In Social Insecurity, Tania Gheerbrant stages a material confrontation with the long history of mental health as a tool of social control. Drawing connections between the witch hunts of early modern Europe, the birth of psychiatric institutions, and the systemic repression of marginalized communities today, her exhibition examines how ideas of “normalcy” have always served political ends — and how they continue to shape the precarious architectures of solidarity.

The reference to Thomas Szasz’s critique of psychiatric power frames the exhibition, but Tania moves beyond his writing to activate a living history. Rather than treating archives as static repositories, she treats them as raw material: petals for sculptural lamps, textures for murals, verses for collective reading. Her method refuses the clinical gaze, instead reassembling stories of resistance among those labeled mad.

At the core of the exhibition lies a video work that stitches together contemporary interviews with voice-hearers and readings of poetry from mental health activist publications. These voices resist the flattening logic of diagnosis. Instead, they articulate a politics and poetics of experience, suggesting that solidarity is not charity, but the shared construction of new social forms.

Upon entering, visitors encounter a mural in low light — silhouettes of familiar figures, half-forgotten by official histories. The flowers made from archival prints, the DIY newspaper aesthetics, the tactile visibility of histories usually hidden or sanitized. By reactivating the discarded and overlooked, Gheerbrant insists on forms of memory that are not merely illustrative, but insurgent.

As states retreat into privatized, individualistic models of care, and as new forms of authoritarianism encroach on daily life, the question Gheerbrant  raises in Social Insecurity is blunt: who will be left to die quietly next time? In tracing the continuities between witch hunts, fascist psychiatric abuses, and contemporary “managed” insecurity, she makes clear that what is at stake is not only mental health, but the very conditions of collective life.

Curated by Mirela Baciak.