Science Gallery Bengaluru's upcoming exhibition season PSYCHE that will explore the human mind and the complexities of thinking and feeling. The 45-day exhibition will be showcased from 01 April to 15 May 2022 and is developed in collaboration with National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), The Wellbeing Project and Museum Dr Guislain, Ghent.
Curated by the Science Gallery Bengaluru team, PSYCHE brings together philosophers, neuroscientists, artists, psychologists, filmmakers, sociologists, writers and performers. Shaped with the advice of a multidisciplinary panel of scholars - Richard Wingate, Sanjeev Jain, Ulrike Kluge and Vikram Patel, and curatorial advisors - Jill Bennett, Marius Kwint, Natasha Ginwala and Ruth Garde, the exhibition will feature 10 exhibits, 6 films and 40+ live programmes including workshops, masterclasses and public lectures.
Created by artist Eugenie Lee who has been living with chronic pain from endometriosis and adenomyosis, it visually explores artist Eugenie Lee’s illness and visceral pain against the backdrop of an objective pain assessment tool.
Speaking to Asian Voice, Dr Jahnavi Phalkey said, ““Psyche” is our fifth exhibition season and our third that is entirely online. The pandemic forced us to reconsider our mode of engagement and opened the digital universe to my team and I. It was also during the pandemic that we confronted the relentless isolation, dread, and grief among our audience as we conducted our last exhibition season, “Contagion.” “Psyche” grew out of that recognition of our own vulnerabilities and that, especially, of our young adult audience members. We address it within the broader idea of a “living exhibition” that we are developing at Science Gallery Bengaluru. With it, we grant our visitors as many entryways as possible to the self-same purpose and message – be it through games, films, exhibits, talks, or masterclasses and workshops. The mind and sentience are perhaps the most intriguing characteristics we attribute to ourselves as human beings. It is an idea we might return to again and again in our programming.
We have, for example, an exhibit by Eugenie Lee on pain and the female body called the McGill Questionnaire. Her exhibit extends, what was a personal experience of pain that was addressed incompletely by medical diagnosis, into a larger comment on the inadequacy of a medical system that takes the male human body as the “universal body;” and, therefore, a system in which maladies of the female body are more likely to be misdiagnosed compared to ones of the male body."
Eugenie Lee told the newsweekly, "The installation, McGill Pain Questionnaire, was driven by my desire to shine a light on the silent resilience of women’s collective pain experiences which have been dismissed for too long. It is my form of activism for women’s rights and of stating that persistent pelvic pain, like Endometriosis and Adenomyosis, are as valid and real, and our experiences are as worthy of care and attention from the medical system, as any other form of chronic illness."
