"Healing Through Fatigue" and "Oculus" at Heidelberger Kunstverein, April 2025

Exhibition "Healing Through Fatigue" of Jakub Choma

The playfulness of Choma´s exhibition environment was imediately speaking to my daughter, despite of the initial respect from the sometimes unknown source of sounds and the visual overload. I believe a 4 year old is not the target audience of Choma´s show, but that is not a reason not to invite her into installations such as. She was rather curious in exploring all the details and felt as if she is welcome to physically interact with parts of the installation, ie. sand, cutlery, moving sculptures. Learning that these are parts of the exhibition and should not be touched, was an idea that she will have to get used to, considering our previous experience with family-oriented exhibitions, where the physical interaction was a pivotal element of her experience.

The story behind the installation, in which Choma introduces elements of a digital gaming world into the space, creating an open-world gaming scenario did speak to me, but was a challenge to interpret to my daughter. We ended up discussing the parallel to the children comics we have been reading together, and showcasing that each station here in the exhibition can be seen as an individual text or image box in the comics, telling part of a story to us. This helped her navigating through the space and finding bits of the installation, that spoke to her in her own language. We found possible reenactment theories for the individual stations and enjoyed thinking about what we could do at each intervention as part of a storyline.

Exhibition "Oculus" of Stephanie Misa and Joscha Steffens

The multi-channel video installation of Steffens was something that immediately captured her attention. Filmed in the Philippines, led by his research on the figure of Jose Rizal, the artist worked with a spiritual community on the reenactment of the final chapter of Rizal´s book titled "Noli Me Tangere". Sisa, the central figure of the chapter is seen to be waiting for her two sons, knowing their fate, when she experiences hallucination-like symptoms. In the end, she indeed gets reunited with her son Basilio, who will have to take care of her unresponsive body deep in the forest.

Despite of the emotional ending of the video, my daughter approached the work with curiosity, asking about the reasons of the characters reactions, that let us speak about potential scenarios in our lives, and how those would make her/us feel. She recognised what emotions were showcased in the video whereas I helped with offering possible reasons for these emotions experienced by the characters.

In order to discuss what might have happened in the video, and in particular, what emotions the little boy and the female character might have displayed, we took the following books on emotions and feelings we have in our home library.

Books:

• Ana Serna Vara: "Érzelmek erdeje" series

• Pat-a-Cake: "Find out about Feelings"

• Wieso? Weshalb? Warum? junior, nr. 32: "Ängstlich, wütend, fröhlich sein"

• WAS IST WAS, Meine Welt: "So wütend, so froh - meine Gefühle"

• Bret Turner: "Happy Either Way: Happy and Worried"

• Marta Drew: "Two Big Feelings: Angry and Sad"

• Írisz Agócs: "A rosszkedv olyan, mint egy felhő"

• Aurélie Chien Chow Chine: "Gaston érzelmei" series

• Manó Könyvek: "Vigaszkönyv"

• Mo Willems: "The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too!"

• Sandra Boynton: "What´s Wrong Little Pookie?"

Tools:

• Learning Resources: See My Feelings Mirror