ornela vorpsi

From Folly to Neurodiversity

 

New painting series by Ornela Vorpsi

 

Folly has had many names throughout the human history, be it insanity or craziness, lunacy or mental disorder. This language has been as abundant as it was unspecific, before the psychiatry started to classify some mental states of the humans into the categories of madness we know today. It has been a long process. “Folly” has been discovered and re-discovered, invented and reinvented by art, philosophy and science, it has been interrogated, analysed and historisized. Today, a new fascination in the porous borders between “normality” and “deviance” is evident, and even the Louvre is preparing an exhibition on images of folly in art.

 

In her new series of paintings, Ornela Vorpsi is taking a contemporary lens on the issue, asking the spectator and herself, how the thousands aspects of “folly” are changing in the age on neurodiversity?

 

Vorpsi’s contemporary take is informed by her interest in the histories of hysteria, medieval cures for melancholia, or Ancient Greek ways of casting out evil spirits through prayer or magic. In one of her paintings, she reflects on the pre-modern treatments for nervous conditions, such as depicted, for example, by Hyeronimus Bosch. His famous “stone of madness” is extracted from the patient’s head by a medieval surgeon, who is pensively trying to localise and objectify the folly in the brain, before taking it out. Vorpsi is also fascinated by Michel Foucault ideas on “modern madness”, when the exchanges between folly and reason were suspended for a while. The language of psychiatry, Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization, “is a monologue by reason about madness, since modern man no longer communicates with the presumed madman. 

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Today, we understand that madness is a very flexible concept that means something entirely different depending on situation, geography and temporality, and Vorpsi’s work reflects on folly’s multiple belongings. Her recent paintings, executed in a pastel mix of the Picasso-esque blue and pink palette, focus on an extreme fluidity of the body-mind conditions and embrace the ideas of neurodiversity. Coined by the sociologist Judy Singer, the term neurodiversity inspired a whole movement during the 1990s, which highlighted neurological differences and the unique ways people's brains work.

 

There is no pathologizing logic in Vorpsi’s paintings, and no desire of “othering” whatsoever. We know well all the dangers of “othering” as the flip side of normativity, which has been obsessed with oppressive standards for every human manifestation and social role. Vorpsi is transforming these pressures through learning and unlearning many things, changing points of view, developing new perspectives, and expanding the boundaries of classical definitions.

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Elena Sorokina

 

Co-curating the Armenian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022

https://gharibpavilion.space/img/Armenian_Pavilion_Gharib_PR.pdf

Co-curating Forms of Fragility, Rudolfinum, Prague, October 2022

https://www.galerierudolfinum.cz/en/photo-gallery/ #radicalcare.initiative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Sorokina