Experiential exhibition From Within at the MO Museum combines art and psychology
MO Museum’s experiential exhibition From Within, curated by Aldona Dapkutė, Deima Žuklytė-Gasperaitienė, and Brigita Kaleckaitė, is the first of its scale in Lithuania and brings together art history and psychology. The exhibition invites people to reflect on and experience the multidimensional impact of a work of art through these two disciplines.
From Within offers a thematic look at Lithuanian modern and contemporary artworks from the 1960s to today. MO Museum visitors will encounter almost 200 works that will encourage them to engage in a dialogue with themselves and to dive deeper into their thoughts and emotions.
Exhibition as a pathway to mental well-being
From Within aligns with MO Museum’s commitment to promoting emotional health. According to Milda Ivanauskienė, director of the MO Museum, the scale of the damage caused by the pandemic and the anxiety felt because of the war brought the topic of mental health to a forefront and prompted the idea of the exhibition.
“It’s undeniable that every visit to a museum, exhibition or work of art has an impact. A natural question might arise: is it necessary and possible to create an exhibition solely dedicated to emotional health? We would say yes, because we believe that the message about the impact of art on health has reached relatively few visitors, and for those who do know about it, it may be unusual to make conscious use of this huge resource,” says Ivanauskienė.
Kamilė Jagėlienė, the curator-coordinator of the exhibition, points out that research on the impact of art on health and well-being has increased significantly over the past two decades, and in recent years there has been a shift in the Museum’s communication.
Research shows that visiting museums acts as a safe, reflective, loneliness-reducing and happiness-inducing activity, and that involvement in the arts is associated with a greater ability to cope with mental health problems in daily life.
“We live in an age of globalisation, but it is also an age of fraying social ties, individualism and loneliness. The exhibition is meant to encourage us to forge a stronger connection with ourselves and the world, to discover what not only separates us, but also unites us – which is common human emotions and experiences, the search for meaning and the nurturing of hope,” emphasises Jagėlienė.
A journey of self-discovery in the exhibition space
The exhibition From Within is based on one of the founding fathers of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung’s approach to personality and creativity, and his ideas are complemented by the theoretician Alain de Botton’s approach, which invites us to embrace art as a phenomenon with a healing power.
According to the curators of the exhibition, art therapist and art critic Aldona Dapkutė, psychotherapist Brigita Kaleckaitė and art critic Deima Žuklytė-Gasperaitienė, not only will the exhibition be meaningful for the visitors wishing to make use of the full range of tools offered by the combination of art and psychology for the purpose of self-knowledge, but also for the visitors who will be interested in only one or the other of the two elements.
“Our aim is to reveal how art affects emotional health and how we react when we encounter artworks. We create the exhibition as a whole so that the viewer has the opportunity to establish a personal relationship with the work itself, with what it says, and to feel how the form speaks to them,” the curators shared.
The exhibition layout itself mirrors the mythical Hero’s Journey, and the themes of the exhibition’s chapters will bring to life several of C.G. Jung’s archetypes – the Ego, the Self, the Persona, and the Shadow – in new ways. Meanwhile, the accompanying art historical and psychotherapeutic questions will connect the two fields like Ariadne’s thread.
Installations created for the exhibition
Among the 200 works by Lithuanian artists, the exhibition showcases two exclusive works of art: the audiovisual installation Highline by film and interdisciplinary artist Elena Kairytė and the light installation Cloud of Thoughts by artist and architect Jurga Marcinauskytė.
According to the creators of the exhibition From Within, it was important to consider the broad spectrum of psychological themes as well as the situations when difficulties are overwhelming and thoughts of ending one’s life arise. In the context of the exhibition, the topic of suicide is subtly touched upon as a liminal state at the other end of the emotional health spectrum.
The installation Highline by Elena Kairytė will invite visitors to stay and reflect on this complex issue, to better understand and notice the circumstances, causes and impulses of suicide, and to know how to recognise and react to the signs, to feel understood, less lonely, and not to stigmatise one’s own and other’s feelings.
Meanwhile, the last stop of the exhibition is Cloud of Thoughts, a space created by Jurga Marcinauskaitė for relaxation and meditation. The light installation made of eco-friendly materials invites visitors to take their time to leave, to experience feelings of fullness, cosiness and warmth, to immerse themselves in their own thoughts and reflections after the exhibition. The installation and the entire space are accompanied by music by the exhibition’s composer Karolina Kapustaitė, which encourages concentration.
