Fluoxetine 20

“Fluoxetine 20” emerged directly after a 20-day stay inside a psychiatric hospital in Tehran, where I remained by a loved one’s side to protect her from harm. The experience left me mentally shaken, and I felt an urgent need to release what I had absorbed. I designed a conceptual costume from bed sheets, tearing the fabric into long strips tied into knots, resembling ropes improvised by prisoners to escape. These ropes were attached to my clothing, their loose ends spreading across the gallery floor like roots searching for release.

The performance was presented twice in a single-day exhibition, accompanied by a video art in which I narrated nonsensical sentences collected from fellow patients during my stay. Their voices—through my own—filled the space, echoing the mental dissonance of the ward. In both performances, without expectation, I vomited at the end, overcome by the same suffocating pressure I had endured inside the hospital.

During the second performance, audience members began, unprompted, to interact—pulling at the ropes, one person binding my hands. I continued, holding the tension between their actions and my own endurance. In the video documentation, I later noticed my father quietly cleaning his glasses with one of the ropes before wiping away tears—a fleeting, personal gesture that bridged the distance between the performance and the private grief behind it.

“Fluoxetine 20” is both a testimony and a purge: an attempt to externalize pain, confront institutional neglect, and reclaim the fragments of self that remained after hospitalization.