There is a growing consensus that medication alone can rarely treat mental illness. So then, what can? Can art and poetry be used to create other forms of language inside the psychiatric clinic – and outside of it, from where we try to understand psychiatry’s often taboo spaces and experiences?
Join O—Overgaden on Tuesday 17 May at 17.00 when the currently exhibiting artist Line Finderup Jensen meets Birgit Bundesen, chief physician at Psychiatric Center Amager, and Anna Rieder, poet and former patient of Bundesen’s, for a reading and conversation about art and mental health: a crossroads that all three work with, each with their own unique approach.

For this artist talk you can meet:
Birgit Bundesen, chief physician at Psychiatric Center Amager and Head of the National Center for Art and Mental Health (CKMS), which is founded on a growing consensus within the health system that medicine alone cannot always treat or cure mental illness. CKMS works with, among other things, initiatives such as workshops incorporating creative writing and visual arts, led by professional artists in collaboration with health professionals, which are offered as part of the treatment at Psychiatric Center Amager.
Anna Rieder, poet and graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing, who has published the poetry collectionHindebæger and the literary pamphlets Ten good pieces of advice for the doctor, Magical thinking, and Symptom translation (published together with Sidsel Ana Welden). Rieder is also a former patient of Bundesen’s, and for this event Bundesen and Rieder will read aloud from their joint text, which has just been published in the anthology Hjertet er en fold med heste (The heart is a fold with horses). The texts were written during a period of hospitalization where Bundesen was Rieder’s doctor, and study poetry’s possibilities of creating other forms of language within the clinic.
Line Finderup Jensen, artist currently exhibiting at O—Overgaden with the exhibition No Exit Prior To Orientationwhich, being based on the artist’s own admission into the world of psychiatry, examines the systems and authoritative positions we attach to objective truth value. With works of virtual reality and animated video, based on Finderup Jensen’s own memories and her own medical records, she opens a door into psychiatry’s often taboo spaces and asks visitors to participate in a renegotiation of what it was that she experienced.

Line Finderup Jensen’s exhibition can be seen in connection with this event. There is free admission to both the Artist Talk and all exhibitions at O—Overgaden.

About Hjertet er en fold med heste
Following the three literary pamphlets that won Bukdahl’s Bet, The Narrow Literature Prize 2021, the award-winning authors Anna Rieder and Sidsel Ana Welden are now publishing a collective, polyphonic book on psychiatry, The heart is a fold with horses, with the publishing house Amulet.

The heart is a fold with horses is an extension of the booklets’ activist project of tenderness, and a book that works to give nuance and articulate what it means to be associated with the world of psychiatry. In addition to the two authors, the book also invites other voices in, including the patient, the patient’s relatives, and the doctor sitting on the other side of the table. A collective vulnerability. Care and resistance.

The star-studded list of contributors (all of whom have a relationship to psychiatry) consists of Birgit Bundesen, Gry Stokkendahl Dalgas, Fine Gråbøl, Jakob Jakobsen, Melanie Kitti, Sebastian Nathan, Asta Olivia Nordenhof, Anna Rieder, Laura Winther Schøler, and Sidsel Ana Welden.