“IN THE EVENT OF PAIN, TRY TO FORGET ABOUT IT”
INSTALLATION

03/2024

Can we overcome pain?
Or is it something the mind can only be rid of at death. I think that mental pain is definitely subjective, a person’s mindset is ultimately what dictates their perception of an event...but then theres the topic of childhood trauma. A child’s mind is not equiped to recognise, process and comprehend a ‘bad’ situation, so their outlook on said ‘bad’ events as it occurs and in retrospect can be very intense–as an initial state of confusion, discomfort, then realisation, regret, can make a person feel a resounding amount of helplessness. This intense sense of confusion and helplessness shocks the under developed brain and can cause young individuals to bury aspects of their memory of those ‘bad’ events into parts of their mind they can’t actively reach (actual psychology theory). Persons suffering from childhood trauma in their adulthood sometimes use forms of therapy to pry out these buried emotions and face them head on–with their now adult-developed brain. Reliving the experience of a traumatic event years later can inspire different perspectives of it, for example the cliché attitude shifts like ‘it wasn’t your fault, you were a child’, which can help the person gain feelings of closure. Acceptance of the traumatic event as fact and past may be how individuals with emotional issues overcome that boundary, but what if acceptance isn’t possible. A forever vengeance and a forever determination to recieve what you desire is a prevailing attitude in ‘Ratched’.

“In The Event Of Pain, Try To Forget About It” is a series of installations portraying the quality of human pain and suffering, featuring two video projections and a custom paper towel dispensor that was situated within a first floor bathroom of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

PROCESS
All videos projections were lopping minute-long clips composed of hand-selected clips from the American psychological thriller television series ‘Ratched’ (2020) that had been formatted and edited by me.

‘Mind’

‘Pain’

The Paper Towel Dispensor

The paper towel dispenser situated within the bathroom that this installation took place in contained 50 paper towels featuring an accompanying text that had been silk-screened onto each individual sheet. During the installation, vistors were free to ‘take a paper towel’ from this dispensor and read.