Welcome to Dr Guislain Museum!

Conference aim
The second Culture & Mental Health international conference will take place in Ghent, Belgium on 28 and 29 November 2024. This conference seeks to promote learning, discussion and debate around cultural interventions aimed at improving the wellbeing of people recovering from mental health difficulties or people in vulnerable situations. The focus of this edition is on supporting the mental wellbeing of forcibly displaced people through art and culture.

In a report in 2022 the EU and WHO call for support for the mental wellbeing of forcibly displaced people through art and culture : “People displaced because of natural disasters, persecution, conflict, generalised violence or human rights violations invariably experience significant loss, physical hardships and other stressors that can lead to psychological distress. A large body of evidence shows how forcibly displaced people contribute positively to society. This potential can be further enhanced by ensuring that they are in good physical and mental health. Therefore, according to the report, it is important to support the arts, as investing in the field is an investment in the mental, physical and social health of forcibly displaced people.”

This conference wants to bring together individuals from the public, academic, third sector and voluntary sectors, to share experiences, practices and knowledge about the importance and impact of the arts, reading, heritage and creativity on improving mental health, wellbeing and resilience of refugees.

 A symbolic venue
The Dr Guislain Museum is an obvious choice as a venue for this conference. Housed in the oldest mental asylum in Belgium, which dates back to 1857, surrounded by a mental health hospital. This museum aims to break down the many prejudices that still define what is mental illness and what is ‘normal’.

Conference programme
Our conference programme is the result of a call for papers and workshops that was reviewed by a programme committee. We have designed a divers and rich programme that covers a broad spectrum ranging from research projects to case studies. On top of this we’ve scheduled interesting keynote speakers for the plenary sessions.

Discover the Conference programme: click here for the programme

 Fees

GENERAL                 STUDENT

Conference Day 1                    100 EURO                      75 EURO

Conference Day 2                     100 EURO                      75 EURO

Full ticket (2 days)                   200 EURO                     150 EURO

Conference Dinner                  50 EURO                        50 EURO

Call for inspiring cases from the Global South
We are calling for inspiring cases of how arts and culture support the mental, physical and social health of forcibly displaced people. The projects have to be situated in the Global South, this comprises Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Israel, Japan and South Korea) and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).

Click here for the open call.

Conference chair
Bart De Nil is a PhD researcher between UCL Arts & Sciences and Information Studies, investigating public libraries as social infrastructure for creative health. For the past decade he has been leading developments in culturally mediated wellbeing in Flanders, Belgium and internationally.

Keynotes

Sulaiman Addonia, Thursday 28 November
Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019) have been translated into numerous languages; the latter was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Fransisco. His third novel, The Seers, will be published in the UK in June 2024 and in Belgium & the Netherlands in September 2024. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium's Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Marit Törnqvist, Thursday 28 November
Marit Törnqvist (1964) is a Swedish-Dutch writer/illustrator of children's books with an award-winning oeuvre and a large audience far beyond the Netherlands and Belgium. In addition to her work, she has initiated numerous book projects for refugee children around the world. Next to illustrating, writing and book promotion, Törnqvist regularly stands on the barricades to give a voice to people on the run. For example, in 2021 she spent three days with an art installation 'The big loss' in front of the parliament building in Stockholm to confront politicians with the failed asylum policy in Sweden.

Nils Fietje, Friday 29 November 
Nils Fietje is a Technical Officer within the Behavioural and Cultural Insights (BCI) Unit at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, where he is leading work on arts and health, having coordinated the first-ever WHO report on the evidence base for arts and health interventions. He is also a co-founder and co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, with a focus on policy development and research implementation.

Sarah Linn, Friday 29 November
Dr Sarah Linn is a researcher based at the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has extensive expertise working with refugee and marginalised communities in the UK, Lebanon and Jordan using creative, collaborative and community-engaged methodologies. She has recently completed work as the Research Associate on Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging, a UKRI funded project which partnered with migrant background young people, Manchester Museum and Sheba Arts to explore the relationships between the forced migration of people and objects (2021-23). She is currently the PI on a British Academy ODA project Surfacing Zarqa which explores the intersection of marginalised youth, heritage and space in Jordan.

Manon Parry, Friday 29 November
Manon S. Parry, PhD, is an historian of medicine and nursing and exhibition curator, specializing in the uses of the humanities for health and wellbeing. She is Professor of Medical and Nursing History at VU Amsterdam, and Associate Professor in American Studies and Public History at the University of Amsterdam. She has served in formal and informal advisory roles for exhibition projects on health and medicine at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia; the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; MUCEM, the Museum of European Civilisations, Marseille, and Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, the national museum for the history of science, technology and medicine in the Netherlands. Her current research project is “Human Curiosities: Expanding the Social Relevance of Medical Museums,” funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Special Collections/University of Amsterdam.

Organised by Dr. Guislain Museum, Iedereen Leest, Red Star Line Museum and Solentra. In co-operation with Universiteit Gent Social Work and Social Pedagogy and University College London Arts & Sciences.

Supported by The Baring Foundation.

In 2023 and 2024 Dr. Guislain Museum will organise with several partners a series of international training events in three European cities with a rich textile heritage: Ghent, Leeds and Tilburg. Although each edition will have a specific focus (communities, co-creation and making/makers) the red thread will be arts-based engagements using textile heritage. The participants of the three editions will be connected through the development of an art engagement using a textile source under the guidance of artist and researcher Claire Wellesley-Smith.

 For second edition of this series, Dr. Guislain Museum will team up with Leeds Museums and Galleries and Arts & Sciences University College London. Together they’ll deliver the International Winter School Cultural Heritage & Wellbeing: Textile Cities from Monday 22 until Friday 26 January 2024 in Leeds (UK).

For five days the participants receive a theoretical underpinning and are going to be guided in developing a wellbeing offering. The participants will encounter a wide range of inspiring cases where co-creation is used for the improvement of the wellbeing. Leeds Museums and Galleries have an embedded Community Team who lead on this offering for the organisation, with goals of improving people’s wellbeing being an integral part of many aspects of the programming across the city’s museums and art gallery. Discover how exhibitions, family workshops, adult programmes, and more are utilised to help people improve their own mental health whilst accessing culture in Leeds.

The Winter School is to be delivered by a highly experienced team of experts who are leading in different fields connected to heritage, community engagement and wellbeing:

-      Bart De Nil, expert wellbeing, culture and community engagement, Belgium
Developed training programs and published several books about cultural heritage, health and wellbeing based on this own experience as a practitioner and researcher. Organised and delivered many international training programmes.

-      Bart Marius, artistic director Dr. Guislain Museum, Belgium
Is leading an internationally renowned museum about mental health that uses its museum grounds as a place of care. Their focus is on creative community engagement in co-operation with neighbourhood health centres.

-      Claire Wellesley-Smith, researcher and artist, United Kingdom
She specialises in long-term engagements in post-industrial textile communities across the north of England. Her research explores connections through textile-based activities that link health, wellbeing and heritage.

-      Chris Sharp, keeper at Leeds Industrial Museum and Thwaite Watermill (LM&G), UK
Is a manager at 2 of the council run museums in Leeds, before which he was an Assistant Community Curator focusing on wellbeing through access to cultural activities and programming. Chris continues to embed a people-centred approach, believing a friendly and kind experience can break down barriers for people and open their horizons for their own benefit.

-      Kate Fellows, head of Learning and Access (LM&G), United Kingdom
Is an experienced and caring senior manager at LM&G who leads a team of dedicated museum professionals across 9 museums and galleries delivering life-long learning accessible to people on their own terms.

-      Thomas Kador, lecturer in Creative Health, University College London (UCL) Department of Arts & Sciences, United Kingdom

Is a material culture specialist with research interests in the health and wellbeing potential of (cultural) spaces, collections and their objects. He convenes UCL’s MASc Creative Health programme, which focuses on non-clinical, asset based health interventions.

Organised in Leeds

Much like Ghent and Tilburg, Leeds is unashamedly a textile city. Its growth from a small town to a large industrial hub happened rapidly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, driven by the industrial revolution and the wool trade.

This trade can be dated back to Cistercian Monks at Kirkstall Abbey from the 1100s and increased massively in the early 1800s making Leeds one of the largest and most diverse cities in the UK.

Leeds Museums and Galleries are a local authority NPO for Arts Council England, managing 9 sites across the city including what was once the world’s largest Woollen Mill, an Elizabethan Country House, city centre art gallery and museum, and ruined abbey.

Their collections are of international importance, and are used along with the venues and skills of its representative workforce to engage with and improve the lives of both the local community and visitors from further afield.

LM&G are proud to be a local authority museum service meeting the needs of the city’s population through resources they themselves own. Health and wellbeing, alongside environmental responsibility and social justice, are at the heart of what they do with their portfolio.

Tilburg

The last edition of Cultural Heritage & Wellbeing: Textile Cities will be the Spring School in Tilburg (The Netherlands), in cooperation with Erfgoed Tilburg and Arts & Sciences University College London, from 3 to 7 June 2024. Focus: making/makers.

Who is this training course for?

1. Professionals working in cultural heritage organisations (museums, archives, galleries, libraries with special collections)

2. Practitioners working with heritage in community engagement and creative health

3. Students and researchers in the field of creative health, museum studies, etc.

At the end of this training course, you'll be able to develop a resource for a specific targetgroup or context, design wellbeing activities, make a detailed plan of a resource and present the rational of a resource to the group.

Practical information

Location: Different locations in Leeds
Fee: 500€ (VAT excluded) / students: 350€ (VAT excluded)

For this you will get lunches, refreshments and snacks during the sessions and breaks, course materials. All other expenses are borne by the participants. Attending the social program is not mandatory. There’s a very large variation of accommodation in Leeds.

Maximum 20 participants. Places in the winter school are limited to ensure the quality and depth of the interactions and discussions. The organisers also aim to ensure a diverse group of participants.

Participants are expected to bring their laptop.

How to register

Send an email stating your name, position and/or institution to: textilecities@gmail.com

You’ll receive confirmation. If your registration is accepted, you’ll receive an email with more details. The invoice for the registration fee will be send to the participant after the confirmation. Your registration is only final after payment of registration fee. The participants will receive in advance a briefing document with a detailed schedule of the winter school.

Nothing is as it seems at the Dr. Guislain Museum. Neither the buildings, people, histories, nor arts allow you to pass judgment on the truth. The new exhibition Untitled adds new elements to these illusions. It reaches out to the voiceless, the invisible, and the anonymous artists.

Today identity is a central theme in political and social debates. In search of their role in society, museums also question themselves. They are transforming into creative breeding grounds where different  interest groups are given a forum. But what about the voiceless? The unknown artists with oeuvres without context?

While classical art museums use categories, schools, and art movements to grasp the artistic reality, Untitled plays the game without all those rules.
Dr. Guislain Museum serves up the tried-and-true recipe of Fine Arts and Contemporary Art. A chronology of icons, historical works, religious scenes, and fascinating still lifes are awaiting. But nothing is what it seems. The division is a product of imagination, simply to underscore the unnatural division between players and outsiders.

Artists without an audience or network are outside the classic role-playing, but Dr. Guislain Museum captures the void within its walls. The fact that most works are untitled and/or their creators remain unknown does not mean they lack meaning. If art is supposed to speak for itself, and the life of an artist is of no importance in finding meaning in a work, then Untitled is an invitation to assess the value of these works for yourselves.

Let yourself be guided by the confusion inherent in this magical place where every prejudice dissolves into nothingness.

THREE DAY MEETING

Thursday 06/07  18h-22h  Free

The Wild Classical Music Ensemble

Blue Flavour

Friday 07/07  14h-18h  Free

Goeste Majeur Fanfare

Bart Maris & Giovanni Barcella Duo

Saturday 08/07  14h-22h  Free

BackBack

Slapstick – Applausorkest (Applause Orchestra) (Stefaan Dheedene)

Directed by Paola Bartoletti – Dick van der Harst – Fulco Ottervanger

In collaboration with WIT.H & Lucinda Ra

Summer starts! Meet us at Museum Dr. Guislain for refreshment and fun.

Check the program:

Sea Legs / 5 July

Go together on a yoga and motion adventure on the track of the exhibition The Gust of Wind.

More information or your registration here.

Psycho Jazz / 6 July / 7 July / 8 July

Enjoy this three day musical meeting. It is totally free! Discover the program here.

(with the support of VDK Bank & City of Ghent)

Flea market / 15 August / 12h-18h

Find the best bargains at the courtyard of Museum Dr. Guislain.

Exhibition The Gust of Wind / all summer long

Escape the heat and discover how a limitation can also become a force. More information? You find it here.

Exhibition SAFE ( R ) SPACE / all summer long

Young people allow you in their safe space. Discover their story about their search for gender expression and identity. Do you want to know more? Click here.

DISCOVERY TRAILS // all summer long

1// Teenager Search (11-13 years)

Bring out your inner Sherlock Holmes. Ask for it at the ticket counter.

2// Family Trail Safe ( r ) Space (2-11 years)

What do you need to be yourself? Ask for it at the ticket counter.

3// Treasure Hunt The Gust of Wind (2-11 years)

Find the treasure! (Free) registration here.

CAFE HET BADHUIS (the bathhouse) // all summer long

Enjoy something fresh or tasty thanks to Pardon Servies (Excuse me service) (Wednesday-Friday). A project which supports young people in search for a job in hospitality.

In May 2022 Dr. Guislain Museum organised at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea (Wales, UK) a very successful international five-day training event aimed at supporting professionals working in or with the cultural heritage sector in the development of programs using cultural heritage for wellbeing activities.

In 2023 and 2024 Dr. Guislain Museum will organise with several partners a series of international training events in three European cities with a rich textile heritage: Ghent, Leeds and Tilburg. Although each edition will have a specific focus (communities, co-creation and making/makers) the red thread will be arts-based engagements using textile heritage. The participants of the three editions will be connected through the developing of an art engagement using a textile source under the guidance of artist and researcher Claire Wellesley-Smith.

For the first edition of this series, Dr. Guislain Museum will team up with the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp and Arts & Sciences University College London. Together they’ll deliver the International Spring School Cultural Heritage & Wellbeing: Textile Cities from Monday 5 until Friday 9 June 2023 in Ghent (Belgium).

For five days the participants receive a theoretical underpinning and are going to be guided in developing a wellbeing offering. The participants will encounter a wide range of methods and instruments that already are been used by inspiring cases were cultural heritage is used for the improvement of the wellbeing of communities. Included in the programme is a field trip to Antwerp to visit inspiring community projects delivered by the Red Star Line Museum.

The spring school is to be delivered by a highly experienced team of experts who are leading in different fields connected to heritage, community engagement and wellbeing:

• Bart De Nil, expert wellbeing, culture and community engagement, Belgium. Developed training programs and published several books about cultural heritage, health and wellbeing based on this own experience as a practitioner and researcher. Organised and delivered many international training programmes.

• Bart Marius, artistic director Dr. Guislain Museum, Belgium
  Is leading an internationally renowned museum about mental health that uses its museum grounds as a place of care. Their focus is on creative community engagement in co-operation with neighbourhood health centres.

• Claire Wellesley-Smith, researcher and artist, United Kingdom.

• Nadia Babazia, public engagement Red Star Line Museum, Belgium. Is a social scientist and anthropologist who fills her days with stories of people and migration. These not only form the red tread that runs through the museum but are also the base for participation and diversity. Nadia summarizes her work as: "bringing people together".

• Thomas Kador, Lecturer in Creative Health, University College London (UCL) Department of Arts & Sciences , United Kingdom. Is a material culture specialist with research interests in the health and wellbeing potential of (cultural) spaces, collections and their objects. He convenes UCL’s MASc Creative Health programme, which focuses on non-clinical, asset based health interventions.

Organised in a symbolic venue

The Dr. Guislain Museum is housed in the oldest asylum in Belgium, which dates back to 1857, surrounded by a mental health hospital, this museum aims to break down the many prejudices that still define what is ‘mentally ill’ and what is ‘normal’. The Dr. Guislain Museum is, as a museum on psychiatry, a place where past and present meet. The Dr. Guislain Museum is a lieu de mémoire and a laboratory, a museum ‘in psychiatry’ where experiment is key, where issues on metal wellbeing and illness are questioned and the complexity of the human psyche is revealed through testimonies, documents and records, art and photography.

Leeds and Tilburg

The following editions Cultural Heritage & Wellbeing: Textile Cities will be:

•  Winter School in Leeds (United Kingdom), in cooperation with Leeds Museums & Galleries and Arts & Sciences University College London, 22 - 26 January 2024. Focus: co-creation.

• Spring School in Tilburg (The Netherlands), in cooperation with Erfgoed Tilburg and Arts & Sciences University College London, beginning of June 2024. Focus: making/makers.

Interested? Fill in this form if you are interested to participate in Leeds and/or Tilburg. When the registration opens, we’ll send you an email with all the information and the possibility to register.

Who is this training course for?

• Professionals working in cultural heritage organisations (museums, archives, galleries, libraries with special collections).

• Practitioners working with heritage in community engagement and creative health.

• Students and researchers in the field of creative health, museum studies, etc.

At the end of this training course, you'll be able to develop a resource for a specific target group or context, design wellbeing activities, make a detailed plan of a resource and present the rational of a resource to the group.

Practical information

Location: Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent (Belgium).

Fee: 500,- EUROS (including VAT). Reduced fee for students: 350,- EUROS (including VAT).

For this you will get lunches, refreshments and snacks during the sessions and breaks, course materials, a return train ticket from Ghent to Antwerp for the field trip on Wednesday 7th June and participation in the social program.

All other expenses are borne by the participants. Attending the social program is not mandatory.

 There’s a very large variation of accommodation in Ghent.

 Participants are expected to bring their laptop.

 Maximum 20 participants.

How to register

Send an email stating your name, position and /or institution to: textilecities@gmail.com

 You’ll receive confirmation. If your registration is accepted, you’ll receive an email with more details. The invoice for the registration fee will be send to the participant after the confirmation. Your registration is only final after payment of registration fee.

 The participants will receive in advance a briefing document with a detailed schedule of the spring school.

The spring school 2023 is organised by Dr. Guislain Museum in co-operation with Red Star Line Museum and Arts & Science University College London. The program of this training is developed and will be coordinated by Bart De Nil, who’s at the forefront in leading developments in relation to culture-led wellbeing in Flanders, Belgium and internationally.

Too Mad to be True, 2nd international conference, Museum Dr Guislain

The Promises and Perils of the First-Person Perspective 

The Too Mad to be True conference is dedicated to exploring the links between philosophy and madness. This year's edition will focus on "the promises and perils of the first-person perspective". Keynotes and parellel sessions will provide stimulating discussions of the nature, value, and potential pitfalls of subjectivity and the first-person in philosophy, psychiatry and psychopathology. 

Keynotes:

Alastair Morgan 

Angela Woods 

Elizabeth Pienkos 

Robert Chapman 

Richard Saville-Smith 

Phoebe Friessen 

Sam Fellowes

Practical Info: 

27-28/05/2023 - start 8.30AM 

Tickets and registration, Here

Full program, Here

Fashion, as a cultural phenomenon is more than societal convention. Through one’s clothes and garments one can show the world an image of who one is, and how one wants to be perceived. As such, clothes have a deep symbolical meaning. Specifically, in the interspace between daily society and mad reality, they can help express our identity, form a second skin that protects us for the gaze of others, and at the same time communicate our deepest sense of self.

Over the past months, the first-year students of Maastricht Academy of Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Programme researched the topic of ‘Mirror Mirror’ for their exhibition ‘Veiled Wardrobe’, (un)dressing body and mind. They studied the exhibitions at Museum Dr. Guislain as well as Liège’s Trinkhall Museum to uncover different approaches to the topic of madness and fashion. The overarching topic of their reflective talks was the de-stigmatisation of people with mental illnesses. The surrealist movement posed as the catalyst of their exploration of the topic and tickled their imagination. Following this interdisciplinary approach, their ideas and concepts culminated in a collection of artistic transdisciplinary visual works.

21-04-2023 at 16:00-20:00 opening with performance

Music is a passion, a way out of boredom and darkness. Music brings life, makes you dream of distant horizons. In 2020 Peter Hoebeke (1969) together with Sammy Van Cauteren (1974) started a series of self-portraits. The theme is Hoebeke himself, his red guitar and an amplifier. With this equipment they went to locations that determined his life: the square of Geraardsbergen, where Hoebeke was born; the station of Gent-Sint Pieters, where he used to take the train as a student; the harbor area where he worked; Caritas where he was a resident during 12 months; the bike workshop where he worked as a volunteer after his illness…

The images tell us about the past and the future, about the art of balancing between the two, searching for a balance between what has passed and what is still about to come. The closing of a chapter of life.

De Windstoot
About the power of limitation

At the end of 2019 non-profit organization Wit.h started a new Art Expeditie: De Windstoot, about the power of limitation. The title refers to a work of Léon Spilliaert representing a young girl at the sea’s edge. She is hanging on the railing of the quay and stares at the horizon. She screams her lungs out. There is a strong wind; however the silence is deafening. De Windstoot is about equivalence, about having power and feeling powerlessness, about giving people a voice in general and giving a voice to artists in particular.

For this new Art Expeditie the non-profit organization Wit.h collaborated with a huge number of international and selected artists who created new work in small groups. They were inspired by the theme of the Ship of Fools and the social topic of power versus powerlessness. Museum Dr. Guislain is responsible for the presentation of the final results. Everything is shown in a museum context and in connection with our own collection. De Windstoot is the result of a collective collaboration spread through time: the contemporary and participative artistic practice goes hand in hand with the public-oriented dynamic of the museum.

A publication goes with the exhibition and there will be a wide range of accessible public activities.

The image representation is the result of a cocreation of Lara Breine and Lien Anckaert. For this work the artists were inspired by the eponymous work of Léon Spilliaert.

No Sovereign Author

Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie

Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie is the result of a collaboration between the residents of La Fabrique du Pré, a Walloon psychiatric rehabilitation institution, and the two founding members of the artistic collective No Sovereign Author: Maroussia Prignot and Valerio Alvarez.

Having worked as psychologists and an occupational therapists for more than fifteen years, Prignot and Alvarez organize creative workshops to try to offer answers to simple but essential questions: Who are the holders of knowledge in psychiatry? How is this knowledge used? What role does photography play in the (re)production of related stereotypes?

For the presentation of Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie at the Museum Dr. Guislain, No Sovereign Author selected twenty-three of the boards created during these workshops. Framed photographic reproductions of them are shown alongside detail enlargements of other non-selected images.

Each original board of Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie is made up of a black-and-white photocopy of a double-page spread, chosen by a resident, from the Dictionnaire de la psychiatrie by French psychiatrist Jacques Postel, as well as additions made by him: handwritten inscriptions and/or images and texts cut from the eight volumes of a 1968 encyclopedia whose content is now obsolete: Les Clefs de la Connaissance.

With the remaining fragments of this dismembered encyclopedia, No Sovereign Author gave birth to a second series of images related to the field of psychiatry. These are presented at KIOSK from April 1 to June 4, 2023 in the exhibition Thematic Apperception Test: Tell Us a Story with a Beginning and an End.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by The Eyes Publishing to be launched in June 2023. For more information: www.theeyes.eu

Practical information:

• Opening: 24.03.2023, 8 p.m

• On view until 01.10.2023

• Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. / Saturday – Sunday, 1 p.m. – 5 p.m.

• Museum Dr. Guislain: Jozef Guislainstraat 43B, 9000 Ghent