Bibliographic Reference

In Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, I argue that there is an exciting new stream of art practice by artists with mental health conditions which aims to restore the negative connotations of the asylum as part the critical work in discharging mental health justice. The art developed by these artists is agential in nature, because they are reclaiming the mental health hospital or the psychiatric institution as an empowering space for themselves by themselves. Instead of an environment assailed by capitalism, settler-colonialism and patriarchy, where mental health patients feel victimized as outcasts by society-at-large, these artists show how the asylum can be rehabilitated into a welcoming, comfortable and positive-identifying space for people who receive institutionalized care based on carceral logics. Indeed, through the artists’ reparative and restorative acts, they also build new and alternate worlds where it is diagnostic categories that are made strange, rather than the patient. Further, categories that once were both alien and alienating for the patient – namely outsider art, or mad art – have been put to good dialogic use by contemporary artists, where they have cripped mental health, and where an “aesthetics of choice” is literally and epistemologically placed inside a dwelling which offers freedom and protection at once.

Image credit: Chanika Svetvilas, Community Care Exchange, 2024, performance during Art in Odd Places, New York. Photograph: Tanya Pramongkit.