Aesthetic Madness: Exploring Art, Psychiatry, and Mental Health at Museum Ovartaci

Museum Ovartaci in Denmark is a museum dedicated to “art and psychiatry,” and it hosts the largest collection of outsider art in the country. I will provide some background on the museum, its archive, and its collection, with particular emphasis on the museum’s potential to contribute to nuanced reflections on mental health. In this context, I will also outline the main ideas and the preliminary plan for the archival research project ‘Aesthetic Madness in the Long 19th Century,’ which has just been launched as a collaboration between the museum, VIA University College, and Aarhus University.