In her exhibition "Between Bodies" at Diagonale, artist My-Van Dam attempts to combat the unspeakable and isolating nature of trauma through a system of perceptible and potentially liberating forms.

Dam’s practice is rooted in an understanding of trauma as embodied. This goes against the grain of a Western analytic tradition that has, since the end of the 19th century, largely adhered to a dualist approach that separates the body and mind. This approach, stemming from a Freudian legacy, has, however, been progressively questioned over the course of the 20th century by thinkers and clinicians such as Pierre Janet (1859-1947) and Bessel van der Kolk (1943-), whose works have contributed to a rejoining of psychological experience and the sensitive materiality of the body. Often grouped together under the designation ‘somatic’, a new set of approaches and expertise no longer regards flesh simply as a support to diagnose or correct, but as a site of knowledge, traversed by memories, affects and relational dynamics.   

Dam’s practice draws on this renewed scientific perspective. A Montrealer of Vietnamese descent, the artist approaches somatic practices as a space for intimate experimentation and a way of approaching the layers of personal and family trauma. But, far from introspective, her work opens the space of exploration to the collective, inviting us to consider the processes of reparation and transformation as streams flowing from one individual to another.

Between Bodies offers a visual translation of these processes and, more specifically, the internal transformations that they render possible. In the gallery, wall drawings, photographs, and sculptures made with knotted fabric form a constellation of traces and remnants. The drawings sketch the trajectories of bodies in movement, like scores in which stories of shared care can be read. The knots, fixed in a mix of plaster, resin and porcelain, render material the tensions and contractions, affections and outcomes that run through them. These works extend, and continue to be irrigated by, earlier performances that were semi-choreographed by Dam and performed by an ensemble of artists and physicians. The visitor encounters, not the documentation of a past action, but the persistence of a movement: the residue of gesture that remains active in these forms.

Through her work, Dam depicts memory that no longer only operates with the characteristics of a story or archive, but as a diffuse inscription in a reclaimed corporeality, whose gestures and rhythms of attention propose less to represent trauma than to shift the modalities of experience and transformation: from language towards the senses, from the individual towards the relational, from a fixed state towards movement.  

                                                                                                                                  - Chloé Grondeau​ / Translated from French by Sarah Knight