Social Insecurity
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.
THE ARTIST
Born in 1994, lives and works in Quimper and Courtils.
She graduated from EESAB – site de Rennes in 2014, then from ENSBA-Paris in 2017. Her art, based on long-term research and forms of co-creation, mainly takes the form of installations, videos and editions.
Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions in institutions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Bally Foundation, Lugarno, Switzerland (2023); Chapelle des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022); 66e Salon de Montrouge (2022); Point Commun, Annecy (2021); Fondation Fiminco, Romainville (2021); Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021); Panacée MoCo, Montpellier (2019); La villa Radet, Paris (2019); or The Other Art Fair, Turin, Italia (2018).
FRAC BRETAGNE – ART NORAC PRIZE
In 2020, Frac Bretagne and its patron Art Norac created the “Prix du Frac Bretagne – Art Norac” or Frac Bretagne-Art Norac Prize. The aim of this prize is to help emerging artists from the regional scene to gain international experience in order to encourage them to develop their careers outside our borders.
Each year, a partner structure in Europe or worldwide, willing to welcome an artist to produce a solo exhibition, is associated with the scheme.
+ Visit the Salzburger Kunstverein website
+ More information on the Prix du Frac Bretagne – Art Norac/ Frac Bretagne-Art Norac Prize
Image: Tania Gheerbrant, Fleurs de l’histoire, 2024, produced with the support of Drac Île-de-France and Palais de Tokyo. Exhibition view Toucher l’insensé, Palais de Tokyo. 2024.
Invisibles
In the context of
Invisibles
In the British TV series The Invisible Man (1958), physicist Peter Brady becomes accidentally invisible after a scientific experiment goes wrong. Forced to bandage his face to appear visible to others, he nevertheless chooses to turn this disappearance into a force for action. Less visible but just as effective, he adopts a discreet, underground form of intervention — detached from spectacle, yet impactful.
This exhibition draws on the idea of presence through absence, resonating with the concept of fugitivity as developed by poet and thinker Fred Moten. For Moten, fugitivity is not withdrawal but a refusal to be captured by dominant norms. The fugitive invents collective, improvised forms of life from the margins, resisting without revealing themselves. To be invisible is sometimes to survive differently — to create from the shadows, to care from the periphery.
The forms of invisibility explored here are social, political, and ecological. They affect a large majority of the global population, pushed to the margins of society and into the background of representation due to gender, origin, social status, health, age, among other factors.
These forced invisibilities often lead to isolation and, at times, even to hostility toward others. Yet we must not forget that it is not difference itself that fuels the tensions of contemporary society, but the diffuse violence of a political and economic system that weakens solidarity, instrumentalizes diversity, and pits people against one another in order to maintain inequality.
The exhibition explores these imposed disappearances — of bodies, voices, territories — and highlights what endures at the margins: discreet gestures, fragmentary presences, silenced narratives. Perhaps these are other ways of living in the world.
ARTISTS
Zoé Aubry
Lounis Baouche
Denis Briand
AA Bronson
Mohamed Bourouissa
Tania Candiani
Carolina Caycedo
Scarlett Coten
Julien Creuzet
Roland Fischer
Hreinn Fridfinnsson
Estelle Hanania
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Jacob Holdt
Sharon Kivland
Latifa Laâbissi
Letizia Le Fur
Hervé Le Nost
Mehryl Levisse
Anna López Luna & Mounir Gouri
Maha Maamoun
Basir Mahmood
Jingban Hao
Barbara McCullough
Julieth Morales
Benoit Piéron
Sequoia Scavullo
Marion Scemama & David Wojnarowicz
Ahlam Shibli
Malick Sidibé
Maryam Tafakory
The School of Mutants
Yves Trémorin
Graphic design : Studio deValence
Insulaire
Insulaire
A selection of works from the Frac Bretagne and Fonds départemental d’art contemporain d’Ille-et-Vilaine collections
For this 10th edition of In Cité, La fourmi-e, in partnership with the Frac Bretagne, wanted to showcase the work of five photographers in a joint exhibition, guided by the general theme of the festival: ‘water…’.
This exhibition takes an artistic and documentary look at the relationships and uses we have with water, the sea and the ocean. The photographs by Aurore Bagarry, Isabelle Arthuis, Daniel Challe, Christina Dimitriadis and Élodie Guignard weave a narrative in which we navigate from one landscape to another, from one universe to another, illustrating our dependence, our interactions and perhaps our future adaptations to these aquatic and maritime environments.
Like an island, this exhibition invites us to look at the water, the sea, the ocean, all around us, and to open our eyes to the sea.
ARTISTS
Aurore Bagarry
Isabelle Arthuis
Daniel Challe
Christina Dimitriadis
Élodie Guignard
June 13 to September 6, 2025
1 Espace François Mitterand
22110 Rostrenen
Image: Elodie Guignard, Narcisse ou le souffle renversé, 2010. Fonds départemental d’art contemporain d’Ille-et-Vilaine © Elodie Guignard. Photo: Elodie Guignard