[Fall 2026]
Taking Care of the Ghosts of Psychiatry
By Fanny Bieth
[EXCERPT]
Published in late 2025, Traité d’hypocondrie is an extension of the art practice that Nicole Jolicœur has been developing since the 1980s, mingling photography, video, text, and installation. The seventy-four-page book contains thirty-five colour photographs drawn from two series. One dates from 1999 and was retrieved from Jolicœur’s archives; the other shows small objects, studio vestiges, in dialogue with common expressions that punctuate the book’s four sections. The chromatic range, dominated by the grey colour of the pages and the powdery pink of the words, is desaturated, as if filtered. The result is a gentle ambience, reminiscent of the images from nineteenthcentury archives that have echoed through Jolicœur’s work since her career began: paper and ink faded with the years, sheets of tissue paper to conserve and protect the photographs.
In Traité d’hypocondrie, Jolicœur revisits the genre of the medical treatise. The book’s title is directly inspired by A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) by the Dutch philosopher and physician Bernard Mandeville. Unlike its better-known cousin, hysteria (closely associated with women’s bodies), hypochondria does not differentiate with respect to the sufferer’s sex. In this context, it is not the syndrome we are familiar with today, characterized by an individual’s excessive concern for his or her state of health, but a form of depressive illness attributed to poorly functioning organs situated in the hypochondrium, the area of the abdomen below the diaphragm, behind the floating ribs – mainly the liver, the spleen, and the stomach. An imbalance in these organs, it was said, was the cause of the sufferer’s putative mental disorder. This historical notion, now discredited, forms the conceptual framework for Jolicœur’s book.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : Taking Care of the Ghosts of Psychiatry ]
Nicole Jolicœur trained at the École des beaux-arts de Québec and is a graduate of Rutgers University; she taught for thirty-five years, first at Université Laval and then at UQAM. Since the 1980s, she has been creating installations combining photography and text, putting discourses and contexts around representations of female subjects into perspective. Her work has been exhibited in Quebec, Canada, England, France, and the United States. She is represented in public and private collections, including those of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, and Musée-Château d’Annecy. www.nicolejolicoeur.com
Fanny Bieth is an author and a doctoral student in art history, specializing in photographic studies, at UQAM. In her research, she looks at the relations between psychiatry and the media of photography and film. She is the publishing coordinator for the magazine Captures.