As Michel Foucault argues in The History of Madness, psychiatric knowledge, far from being neutral, has always been intertwined with power structures. The asylum functions as an institution where madness is observed, categorized, and treated according to the prevailing medical and moral judgments of the time. During the Age of Reason, anyone whose behavior deviated from the norm was locked away from society, as though mental illness were contagious. Insanity became the new leprosy. Unreasonable, chaotic, delirious behavior was to be controlled by authority, molded into moral uniformity, reduced to silence. The segregation of otherness fueled fictions about the mysterious nature of madness, viewing it as divine possession or a sign of genius, rather than understanding mental illness as part of the human experience. Has this situation changed today, when society seems so eager to discuss mental health issues, or is the ‘science’ of madness still merely a social construct used to legitimize the authority of institutions over the bodies and minds of individuals?

In her project Irgendwie aus dem Kopf (Somehow out of My Mind), the artist Aleksandra explores the myth of the ‘tortured genius,’ examining the connection between creativity and mental illness. She collaborated with patients from a German psychiatric hospital, inviting them to ‘diagnose’ her artworks by giving them titles, adding brief descriptions, and determining the orientation in which they were to be hung. This collaborative process opens a discussion about the boundaries of creation. As poet Tilghman Goldsborough writes in the introduction to the project’s catalog, ‘before the intervention of the patients, the drawings existed, but as unoriented objects in space, like a hammer or a rock.’ Once linked to the ‘movements of the soul,’ these objects become layered with new meanings and visions, shaped by patients, whose diagnoses are the only information available about them.

Red, blue, black, and occasionally yellow or purple—Aleksandra’s abstractions are created using basic colored pencils to accentuate their raw, primal geometry. Forms evoking arches, portals, broken gates, and doors that resemble guillotines merge into vortexes and voids; colliding mountains or mouths; stings, strings, blood vessels, lagoons, sailing ships, bleeding stones, armpits, antennas, icicles, and robotic scorpions—electric currents pulse through the pieces she creates. Movement is constantly present, electrified with tension that seems about to burst—the drawings capture the very last moment before the collapse.

Aleksandra herself was a patient at the mental institution while conducting her artistic research. The drawings resulted from a three-month confinement that prompted her to question clichés about the nature of mental illness. By collaborating with other patients, who, like her, were defined by their diagnoses within the psychiatric facility’s walls, she could at least partially escape from the painful processes occurring inside her mind and view them from unconventional perspectives that did not pretend to be objective or knowledgeable. The descriptions often channel not what is depicted in the drawings but what emanates from them: the artworks are seen through the emotional states projected by the collaborators.

Art and mental health have long been interwound through the overused image of the struggling artist, whose sensitivity is seen as the source of both their creative genius and psychological unrest. From Van Gogh’s severed ear to Munch’s The Scream and Schiele’s anxiety-ridden portraits, modernism embraced madness by romanticizing it, while contemporary art, driven by market tendencies, has commodified it. Whether it’s the psychedelic Disneyland of Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots or the ADHD ambiance of Tracey Emin’s bedroom, to be successful artwork must package mental illness in a marketable form: bold, eye-catching, ironic, provocative, but always within the limits of the neoliberal agenda. 

In contrast to Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society,’ which functions through external repression, philosopher Byung-Chul Han coined the term ‘achievement society’ to describe new mechanisms of power that operate through self-regulation. Individuals are now encouraged to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves,’ internalizing expectations to constantly optimize their performance. ‘In the achievement society, everyone carries their own labor camp within themselves,’ writes Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. 

The self-exploitation framework of late capitalism fosters a culture of burnout, creating fertile ground for mental health conditions marketed as individual responsibilities, obscuring the structural issues that fuel the global horrorscape. Even more sinisterly, it turns mental health into yet another consumer good. Once diagnosed with depression, anxiety, ADHD, or borderline disorder—you name it—patients are then prescribed medications that often exacerbate their conditions, trapping them in a cycle of addiction while boosting the pharmaceutical sector’s profits. Benzodiazepines, or benzos, are among the most harmful of these drugs, due to overprescription and lack of dosage control. 

Floor Plan, another of Aleksandra’s projects, explores the psychiatric institution through the mental states she experienced during benzodiazepine withdrawal. The series of 80 drawings is organized into seven ‘rooms’: Confinement, Noises, Perceptions, Creatures, Feelings, Body, and Hopes—each depicting different stages of her detoxification journey, blending hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, paranoia, and the feeling of a complete loss of control over her mind and body. The artist describes it as ‘the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life—like a bad drug trip, but instead of lasting 24 hours, it went on for two weeks.’

The first room explores the dynamics of enclosure, mimicking various spatial structures—both natural and architectural—that reveal systemic dysfunction and delimit the boundary between inside and out: broken spider webs, labyrinths ending in countless dead ends, walls, fences, and borders that seem impossible to overcome. In the second room, the viewer is confronted by the overwhelmingly resonant textures that emanate from the drawings, fragmenting the image into sound. Cracking, grinding, and gnashing noises are jumbled and tangled together, stumbling over one another, colliding with and penetrating both each other’s and the viewer’s sensory perception with chaotic, uncontrollable movements. Aleksandra’s abstract objects/creatures are simultaneously schemes and lifeforms—structured and visceral, organic and inorganic—they present feelings embedded in the architecture of a glitching machine.

The artist’s background in engineering, her first field of study before transitioning to art, is reflected in the hybrid realm of carnivorous geometries that ferociously interact with one another in mechanical ritual dances of death and resurrection. Spaces metamorphose into creatures that haunt her with threatening premonitions of disasters from the past and the future. The titles the artist gives to her works—riddles of her disturbed psychological states—blur the boundary between the pictorial and the written, entering a twilight zone of semiotics, paradoxically abstract yet precise in their physicality: ‘Self-Portrait with an Open Brain,’ ‘Headache,’ ‘A Living Scar,’ and ‘Skin Restlessness.’ In the final room, the gloomy emotional atmosphere begins to shift: the patterns become more harmonious, no longer emitting the electric frequencies of anxiety and panic attack glitches. Instead, they transition into the smooth calmness of repaired machinery. But is this truly a happy ending?

The subsequent series, Landschaften der Grausamkeit (Landscapes of Cruelty), was created by Aleksandra shortly after her release from the hospital. In these chronicles of her first weeks outside the mental institution, she captures the overwhelming confusion and disorientation caused by surroundings that seemed alien and unreal. The desolate abstract landscapes, rendered in a palette of dark red, blue, and gray, depict obscure transitional spaces that at times resemble cells under a microscope, and at others uninhabitable constructions with sharp, penetrating asymmetry—evoking dystopian sceneries from Lovecraftian weird tales. The oppressive architecture of these liminal non-places reflects the artist’s desperate sense of not fitting into a world of normativity, where everything is measured and standardized in terms of productivity, while creativity and genuine emotional expression are regarded as secondary or unnecessary. 

But are the people who conform to these standards actually sane? Aleksandra’s pathological landscapes vividly capture the collective burnout and depression in a society where ‘even the soul becomes a subject of optimization.’ Who sets the norm in a world where everyone seems to be mentally unwell?

Karina Abdusalamova