Hystera (edition I) is born out of a desire to create a critical framework around the phenomenon of “woman’s hysteria” and how it has been a consistent tool to supress women and consider them unwell while simultaneously being unwilling to put research into women’s health. Hystera I catalogues these issues in the context of how women who were experiencing “hysteric episodes” have been documented throughout history, through illustrations, photography, painting and film. The word Hystera is the Greek word for Uterus, resulting in the sexed word Hysteria. Rather than simply composing an essay which would function outside of the gallery space, I created a publication which is a part of a greater instillation work, pushing the idea that a gallery institution is not immune to the imbedded beliefs around women facing a certain form of neurosis exclusive to one sex. One of my major references is Stupidity 2002, a book by literary critic Avital Ronell, in this book she uses Marx’s theory of the three GrossMachts, “great powers” being economy, violence, and stupidity to study how mass ignorance affects our experience of history.

Due to these great powers, as a species we experience a certain stuckness in history, this mythos around gendered hysteria continuously haunts and causes division. A feeling of “being stuck” ensues with frustration when women are continuously discussed as being at a lack, while paradoxically at an excess. In this publication I created I utilize writing done by women in collaboration with my own writing around how ignorance has pushed these false narratives around binary psychological symptoms, in parallel to male depiction of “hysterical women”.

Through the string which ties the two copies together, the publication hangs at two ends of a pole, harking back to the idea that this depiction of gendered hysteria, visualized and documented by men is inevitably tied to these writings done my women which reflect on this illusion of systematic transformation. It also functions as a metaphor for a telephone line, or line of communication between two of the same, an echo chamber of histories repetitive nature.