Scream /ˈskriːm/ Primal sound, symbol of communication before language and articulated speech. It is usually instinctive action, defined by a strong emotion such as fear, pain, surprise, joy, anger. Even though pleasant emotions such as joy, could be expressed through screaming too, as form of releasing internal tensions, it is more often associated with personal state of inability to accept some situation.
In the modern consumer society, food has become a microcosm of the complex attitudes and values, where the link between food, emotions and meaning(lessness) proves to be inevitable and mutually conditioned. Certain emotions and emotional states (anger, anxiety, panic, joy …) prevent or block the feeling of hunger, while other (stress, fear, depression …) behave as triggers where unmet needs are being substituted with food in order to make individual feel “fulfilled”. On the third side, there are eating disorders which are frustratingly inseparable from the question of socially imposed, ideal psycho-physical body and the lifestyle related to it.
IScream is primarily addressing delicate connection between needs, emotions, and meaning(lessness), as well as their social conditioning, substitutions and impossibility of manifestation. It represents all the voices and personal positions of authors that led to the individual split on the inside-which can not be adequately expressed, and the outside-confronted with imposed expectations. In such cleavage, very deep and personal confusion shows up and shares the same feeling of nausea and discomfort, essentially close to the term abject by Julia Kristeva- where an individual abjects itself within the same motion through which it establishes itself. An information, not possible to be “digested”, asks to be repelled thorough physical reaction. Such heterogeneous flux defines territory that we call ours because other (what we can not “digest”) is pointed out to us, through loathing or repulsion.
By demystification of individual, emotional state, and formal articulation of what we can not “digest” on individual as well as social level, exhibition IScream actualizes the question of “eaten” (suppressed) desires, needs, and fears and confronts us with questions: What are we fed up with? And hungry for? What feeds us? Is feeling of “satiety”, full satisfaction, reachable at all? Using dichotomies: inside-outside, subject-object, me-other, individual-society, “IScream” represents materialized emotions, and illustrates how inner ache is instead of being screamed, smothered by art through which authors start to speak.
