Rehearsals of Madness

09.07.2022 - 09.07.2022

Kunstverein Kevin Space, Wien / Österreich

For this series Kevin Space invites artists and writers to site-specifically think and work through ways of shaping the frameworks within which they operate – including the respective relationships to bodies, places, knowledges, and histories that these infrastructures allow for – and to push their material and ideological boundaries. After six years of exhibition making, Kevin Space furthermore aims at critically reflecting on our own involvements, desires and motivations.

Rehearsals of Madness focuses on affective and psychoanalytical investments into institutions.... This first iteration takes the fundamental anti-psychiatric idea that the definition of “insanity” is contingent on social norms as a starting point to engage in its potentially emancipatory character as a form of resistance, being able to break with liberal morality. It presumes that a certain normative behavior is determined largely by economic dependencies, may these be characterized as cultural and social capital. Laura Hatting, Krõõt Juurak, Sophia Roxanne Rohwetter and Miriam Stoney address madness in its multiple meanings as insanity, folly, irrationality, anger, and despair to respond to instrumentalizations of criticality within the field of art: when critique is accepted as long as it is not too uncomfortable or distressing and the consumable play between transgression and acceptance remains a performative tool to secure the status quo.


Laura Hatting lives and works in Vienna. Hatting refuses to be categorised into a single narrow field of practice. The main content of the artist's work is capitalist alienation, clinical monstrosity, disgust and despair.

Krõõt Juurak, born 1981 in Tallinn, is an artist and performer, whose work often deals with de-professionalization. Their work comprises of performances and performative conditions, presentations, texts, workshops, moods and conflicts. Juurak lives and works in Vienna.

Sophia Roxane Rohwetter is a writer and researcher working in cultural theory and art writing. Her research focuses on visual cultures of anti-psychiatry, feminist poetics of madness and psychoanalysis.

Miriam Stoney works with text. Often working collaboratively, her practice incorporates art writing, audio, performance and installation. Having completed studies in art history at Oxford University and architectural history at UCL, her work now explores architectures of selfhood in the various ecologies we inhabit.

[Quelle: Einladung]