Linda Zhengová – Catharsis (Special Edition with a Signed and Numbered Print)

How can one represent something visually that is by its very essence unrepresentable without banalizing it, trivializing it, spectacularizing it, and finally repressing it for a second time?

Catharsis prioritizes a lived experience and explores traumatic memory not from the perspective of moral and medical classifications but instead, as an open artistic inquiry. The images that comprise the series originate from the past but additionally enliven the emotions in the present time.

Mingling somewhere between anxiety and confrontation with reality, the project reveals an imaginary collective of traumatic experiences that belong to different individuals and the post-traumatic emotional process all victims of affliction can relate to. The series, therefore, may be interpreted as a photographic representation of the common human experience of trauma combined with a narrative that stems from my personal encounter with the torment.