This exhibition questions the concept of ‘one shared reality’

By Annabel Simjouw

Reality by Yasmijn Karhof.

What is it like when your reality is viewed as less ‘real’? What defines our reality, and who decides whether your reality is healthy, unhealthy or even abnormal? These are questions Yasmijn Karhof addresses in the exhibition Reality, which she made during her stay as an artist in residence at King County Hospital, New York. The results of her residency are a large tapestry and an audiovisual installation with big blueprints hanging from the ceiling, showing photographs of the staff and patients. Karhof became intrigued by how reality was perceived by the staff and the patients that were housed in the hospital, and in this way she questions the way we experience reality altogether. It might for instance seem a bit ignorant to tell a man who is seeing people coming through the walls that what he is experiencing is not ‘real’. How could it not be his uttermost reality in this case? We cannot see what a person in psychosis might be experiencing, and this separates our reality from theirs. This however does not necessarily mean his reality is less real than ours.

This article was published in Spiegeloog.

Spiegeloog is the magazine for the Psychology Department of the University of Amsterdam. Spiegeloog is issued seven times a year in print. New articles are published online every week.