Manifesta '16

Presented at Café Voltaire during the Manifesta Biennale in Zürich, this work examined therapy as a cultural construct and a performative architecture. Therapy is often treated as a neutral, professionalized form, but it is also theater. It has beats, staging, characters, power dynamics, confessions, masks. During the performance, a woman from the audience spontaneously stepped onto the stage. Without any prompting, she revealed intimate details about her mental health and asked for real therapeutic engagement. The room shifted instantly. The performance became an unscripted session. The boundary between art and therapy dissolved. This event marked a turning point in my practice. It confronted the assumption that therapeutic structures are fixed or sacrosanct. It raised questions about consent, exposure, collective witnessing, and the porousness of forms we think of as stable. Manifesta '16 asked: If therapy is a construct, how far can we stretch it until it becomes something else entirely. And what happens when the audience becomes the patient and the performance becomes ungovernable.

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