THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE AS PERFORMED BY THE PRAGUE-BASED EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE COMPANY AKANDA FOR THE PATIENTS AND STAFF OF THE BOHNICE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
Artist
Althea Thauberger
(Canadian, born 1970)
Date2012
Mediumdigital video (colour, sound)
Dimensions47:17 minutes
Credit LineCollection of Remai Modern. Purchased with the support of the Mendel Art Gallery Foundation 2014.
Object number2014.9
Classificationsvideo
On View
Not on viewIn this work, also referred to by the shorthand title Marat Sade Bohnice, Althea Thauberger has restaged the play, Marat/Sade, written in 1963 by German dramatist Peter Weiss. The premise of Weiss’ play is that the Marquis de Sade wrote and directed a play about the death of the radical French journalist and politician, Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793), while he was institutionalized in the Charenton Asylum in 1808. Thauberger’s restaging is set in the decommissioned laundry facilities of a large psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, Czech Republic, She collaborated with a Prague-based experimental theatre company and the patients and staff at the Bohnice hospital.
At the core of Thauberger’s work is a concern for examining the nature and limits of institutional forms. In Marat Sade Bohnice, the staff and patients of the hospital discuss the notion of the institution itself as a necessary system of social order where the ideal of freedom—as imagination, political emancipation, non-conformity or lived experience—is described as having dangerous, perhaps sadistic, consequences.
At the core of Thauberger’s work is a concern for examining the nature and limits of institutional forms. In Marat Sade Bohnice, the staff and patients of the hospital discuss the notion of the institution itself as a necessary system of social order where the ideal of freedom—as imagination, political emancipation, non-conformity or lived experience—is described as having dangerous, perhaps sadistic, consequences.
