News and projects

ME/CFS is the name of a mon­ster: one that many peo­ple and their loved ones fight in Aus­tria and around the world. A severe and not rare mul­ti sys­tem ill­ness, for which there is no causal or acces­si­ble treat­ment up to date. Due to the Covid pan­dem­ic and the mil­lions of peo­ple affect­ed by Post (Long) Covid, this often unrecog­nised and triv­i­alised ill­ness is get­ting a lit­tle more pub­lic attention.

“To even try to realise this exhi­bi­tion despite this ter­ror is com­plete mad­ness” — this was one of the thoughts that were on the mind of Judith Schoßböck and Matthias Moll­ner in autumn 2021, when they decid­ed to trans­late their per­son­al stroke of fate into art — as a way of pro­cess­ing their expe­ri­ence and inti­mate insight into a silent and invis­i­ble world, in which mil­lions of peo­ple miss­ing from soci­ety (the #mil­lion­s­miss­ing) are mobil­is­ing their lit­tle ener­gy for dai­ly sur­vival and recog­ni­tion; of an ill­ness that dia­met­ri­cal­ly oppos­es the com­mon ori­en­ta­tion on moti­va­tion and per­for­mance, as any activ­i­ty or exer­tion is pun­ished with a wors­en­ing of symptoms.

In this exhi­bi­tion Moll­ner, Schoßböck (alias BLACK FERK STUDIO) and oth­er artists and cre­atives reflect on the real­i­ty of liv­ing with ME/CFS. To cre­ate art in this con­text becomes a spe­cial and risky activ­i­ty, as for suf­fer­ers of the dis­ease it is relat­ed to phys­i­cal con­se­quences. Sen­su­al and oth­er hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ties are fur­ther chal­lenges to any artis­tic endeav­our or par­tic­i­pa­tion in a community.

Dis­played are var­i­ous artis­tic per­spec­tives togeth­er with fur­ther infor­ma­tion on the ill­ness in dif­fer­ent con­texts: from the per­son­al view of peo­ple affect­ed to the stand­point of soci­ety, from help­less­ness to activism, from the iso­la­tion of the indi­vid­ual to the col­lec­tive view, from the emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of per­pet­u­al cri­sis to sci­en­tif­ic facts. The exhi­bi­tion tells sto­ries from the “night­side of life” (a term Susan Son­tag used for ill­ness), gives insights into cop­ing strate­gies, and seeks to utilise open­ness and dark-but-colour­ful humor against suf­fer­ing and neglect.