Hanna Sydorenko. Hospital. Therapeutic Openness. 1997. Documentary Archive, Photographs

Description of the work:

The work that Hanna Sydorenko created during the KulturKontakt residency is an example of self-archiving and self-therapy through the artist’s acknowledgment of her own illness.

The emergence of the work was caused by unforeseen circumstances: due to a deterioration in health related to a gynecological operation the day before, during the residency the artist was admitted to the gynecological ward in a hospital in Vienna.

The basis of the work consisted of accompanying materials, documents, and photographs of the stay in a European hospital. The space of the gynecological ward is exclusively a female environment of patients. The staff of the social Vienna hospital also included nuns who cared for the patients. Thus, the artist found herself in a traumatic female territory where patients of different ages, nationalities, professions, and life circumstances were simultaneously present in a state of collective experience of the trauma of physical illness.

The artist characterizes the artwork as self-therapeutic, particularly through the conscious materialization of medical documents of the rehabilitation process and hospital stay. This became a process of self-archiving her own physical illness and the acquired moral and psychological trauma from the experience of forced pregnancy termination.