To speak about madness or unreason is to speak not only about forms of consciousness but also about the description of historical systems of thought. Whether madness is described as a philosophical or spiritual phenomenon or as an objective medical psychopathology, these conceptions are not discoveries in themselves – rather, they are historical productions of meaning. So, if madness is a phenomenon of culture, curing the mad is not the only possible reaction to insanity.

In this state of shared insanity, we wonder how we can instrumentalize our own condition, or maybe learn from it. Not for the sake of optimizing our yield but because, as humans, we are behavioral strategists and learning is, at its core, a biological process. Therefore, this group exhibition looks into art practices from diverse geographies that understand insanity as a form of knowledge and that use risk-taking as a method to learn, when there is something at stake – practices that through careful bruising attempt to heal. But we must not forget that madness does not tell the truth about art, or vice versa. We still need to acknowledge the links between both, because as gays, butches, feminists, junkies, migrants, the undocumented, sex workers, crips, HIV positives, transsexuals, transgenders … our relation to art today can only be paranoid.