Who has enlarged this hole
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Who has enlarged this hole?" (1994) was a group exhibition held on West 9th Street in New York, in the brownstone where a retired psychiatrist named Alice E. Fabian had died some years before.
Sidén participation
Ann-Sofi Sidén participated deals with Fabian's remnants, including written journals, audio journals, books, polaroids, and strange markings on the walls. Fabian lived the last 20 years of her life alone, and she was convinced that she was the subject of surveillance. She used the tools of her trade to prove her case, collecting exhibits and evidence, clearly labeled and explained by Dr. Fabian, that built up her own case against purported FBI agents who "zap" her with electricity and bug her house.
Sidén's participation in the group show was her work entitled, It's by Confining One's Neighbor that One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity, Part I (1994). The title is a play on a Dostoyevsky quote, "It is not by confining one's neighbor that one is convinced of one's own sanity."
The site-specific piece in New York was transformed into It's by Confining One's Neighbor that One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity, Part II (1995).
The American psychiatric journals that were part of Fabian's library were used in, Would a Course of Deprol Have Saved van Gogh's Ear? (1996), where the pharmaceutical advertisements from the journal were put on display.
Sidén explains her own reaction to the advertisements that she found in the journal:
Glancing through some of the magazines it struck me that here was one of the most blatant forms of subliminal marketing. Flashy advertisements for psychiatric pharmaceutical products were mixed with serious scientific articles. The images in the advertisements often showed depressed women in their own homes, carrying such captions such as: 'She's too anxious to talk to you! For severe anxiety, SERAX (oxazepam) may well prove beneficial.' It occurred to me that exactly like religion, the psychiatric science--in spite of its very brief history--had its fair share of structurally implicated madness and violence connected to it.
