Simon Chang is a photographer who started photographing patients in psychiatric institutions in 2004 in Prague, where he photographed the Bohnice institution for several years. Between 2018 and 2019, he photographed the Hawler Psychiatric Hospital in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose cells are mainly filled with patients suffering from the effects of the recent war devastation. This time, the series of photographs is presented in Cmurek Castle, which operated as a State Asylum for the Mentally and Neurologically Ill between 1956 and 2004.
The transfer of images from the mental hospital in Erbil to the former institution in Slovenia thus establishes a kind of dialogue between the two spaces, and the walls of Cmurek Castle become the universal walls of mental hospitals, imbued with the memories and events that happened to its former inhabitants and, at the same time, to the inhabitants of all such institutions.
