Ana María Millán Arkham Asylum

Ana María Millán:
Arkham Asylum at Five Years

Screening & Seminar Saturday 8th June. Curated by Esther Planas

Following the invitation to use our site / space as a residence to produce and experiment with a new series of works, Ana María Millán felt she wanted to ponder about the particular structural ethos that the Five Years project represents, and to set up the production working process in a way that would explore (while mirroring) the structure of the organisation that is hosting her.
She coincides with my interests and preoccupations with the politics of artist-run projects .In this case, she looks at two mental health institutions that we can call peripheral because of their unusual characteristics: Core Arts Centre, Hackney and the fictional Arkham Asylum Batman DC and proposes a link of their structural signifier to Five Years and to Helena Producciones which is the artist-run production group that Ana María belongs to.
The main gallery space will become a place to build up new relations and re-create narratives between referential texts. The fictional Elizabeth Arkham Asylum serves as a channelling “haunted like” virtual place.
As we penetrate inside its virtual comic strip walls, the idea of its political form and content reveals it self as a model that opens for discussion about the ethical depths of convivial issues and the managerial distribution of power and responsibility related to the insides of alternative and experimental enterprises inside or at the border of the Institution, including the always too uncomfortable to look at to, as the ones caring for mental health.
Based on a series of exercises on film, recorded conversations and performances. Ana María Millán, will shoot, edit and finish a film.
Saturday 8 of June, Ana María, will introduce her project to the public on an artist talk followed by the screening of her film . We are aiming to produce material for papers about issues related to precariousness, love or its lack, self-made and self-managed parallel or alternative institutions and madness as an object/subject that has been capitalised from various fronts.
 
Esther Planas

Ana María Millán, Cali, Colombia
lives and works between Cali and Berlin


www.anamariamillan.info
www.helenaproducciones.org
 

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