Excavating the Psyche
Excavating the Psyche was a 2015 exhibition and installation examining the social history of psychiatry and psychotherapy in state-socialist Bulgaria, and a foundational model for Julian's subsequent scholarly and artistic research.
The project emerged from ten months of fieldwork and archival research conducted in Bulgaria as a U.S. Fulbright grantee in 2014–2015. Through original scholarship, archival photographs, and an immersive installation, it investigated how the Soviet-mandated adoption of Pavlovian materialism in the 1950s restructured Bulgarian psychopathology — suppressing psychoanalytic, psychosomatic, and individual-centric therapeutic approaches in favor of an aggressively empirical framework oriented toward the body and behavior. The exhibition traced how this restructuring narrowed both the means by which individuals could articulate psychological distress and the interpretive frameworks available to the clinicians treating them.
Excavating the Psyche was a foundational project for two major strands of subsequent work. The Fulbright research became the basis of a published article in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (2018) and, later, a chapter of the dissertation The Clinical Studio: Art, Attention, and the Mind Sciences (Princeton, 2025), which argues that the Soviet turn in Bulgarian psychology foreclosed the conditions under which art could function as therapeutic mediation — a Cold War counterpoint to its American case studies. The exhibition itself — an experiment in using installation to convey histories inaccessible through conventional scholarly forms — was a first step toward the practice-based methodology that would develop into The Neighbours, the collaborative multimedia installation that represented Bulgaria at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Project team
- Julian Chehirian — concept, research, installation, exhibition
- Sara Mahan — project development, curatorial text editing
- Boris Pantev — translation of exhibition texts
- Dylan Burchett — sound for the installation
- Jorge Rubiera — documentary film (shot and edited)
Interviews & responses
- History in Between Archive (EN/BG)
- Center for Advanced Study Interview (EN)
- Fulbright Interview (EN)
- Radio Bulgaria Article (EN/BG)
- Kapital Magazine Interview (BG)
- American University in Bulgaria Article (EN)
- Culture out the Box Interview (EN)