This post was originally published on artnews.com
The Swedish artist and filmmaker Anna Odell spent a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, starting in the ninth grade and lasting up until she had a child—a boy fathered by one of her nurses, a man named Rikard.
Odell painstakingly reconstructed her final months in the ward where she had been involuntarily committed in the late ’90s for her new film Rekonstruktion – Pysket (Reconstruction – Psychiatric Ward), 2024. The two-channel work is the centerpiece of an exhibition that also includes photographs and sculptures, on view at the Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway through March 9.
The film is in no way sensational or traumatic. What is most shocking, rather, is how calm and cool the whole thing is. Odell phones anonymized nurses who cared for her at the time, asking them to relay their thought processes, their actions, and, mostly, their inactions. What stands out, besides the clearly gripping story, is the way Odell seems so open and curious in her mission to understand how something like this could happen, her curiosity superseding her resentment.
Her unflinching view is partly a way to reconstitute a somewhat hazy memory: the traumatic event happened while she was both heavily medicated and experiencing psychosis, and it doesn’t help that an ominous void was left in her medical notes. Her records mysteriously evade mention of her pregnancy until four or five months in: “the patient is tired due to pregnancy.” The child is not mentioned until he is seven months old.
More than a personal reconstruction, the film is also a portrait of the ways that bureaucracy and institutions perpetuate power. No one in particular wanted to make Odell’s problem their own. Instead, nurses abdicate with double negatives and passive voice: “You don’t make a decision not to make notes,” says one (in Swedish). Eventually, another admits they didn’t want their name associated with something that might be used in court, another that she feared being a hypocrite, having broken the rules herself: once, she let a patient ride a motorcycle. “Maybe that was also abuse,” she wonders. That scene is one of the few times in the film anyone calls it “abuse,” and it is woefully unsatisfying.
Odell even phones Rikard, who recalls with grating nonchalance that “no one really cared” and that he has no memory of being reprimanded, only reassigned. He describes his actions—their “relationship”—as “therapeutic.” Even here, Odell doesn’t protest or argue; she only asks more questions.
Odell’s genius is in capturing power dynamics in all their complexity. We hardly need art to tell us that men abuse women, that psychiatric intuitions abuse patients: such realities are as banal as they are horrific. Again and again, nurses describe the artist as vulnerable but powerful too, remarking on her commanding presence. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Odell was so easy to gaslight and discredit, but the facts of her body, and of the child, could not be denied. In the end, it was the pregnancy that set her free, the hospital not wanting responsibility for these facts. And out came a remarkable artist.
Rekonstrukton – Psyket is brilliant too for the way its cool affect parodies rationality: people, women especially, are typically pathologized for extreme emotionality. But the film hardly makes calm detachment, or following the status quo, seem sane.