FAINTING COUCH - A mobile, traveling community project

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” -Hannah Arendt, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”

What does knowing our past tell us about the future? Christy Chan’s Fainting Couch invites visitors to examine America’s history of intergenerational privilege and culture of gaslighting when confronting racial and social inequities.

In response to the recent bans of critical race theory in 21 U.S. states and muzzling of conversations about American history, the Virginia-born Chan reupholstered an 1890s fainting couch with a custom textile design (“Disembodiment”) and invited 100 participants to rest on the couch in an act of decolonization.

Why a fainting couch? During Victorian times, upper-class American women practiced corseting, which restricted movement and blood flow to the brain. A loss of consciousness and propensity to retreat from conversation became normalized and idealized as “beauty” in women of privilege. With fainting couches serving as a place for female rest, the act of performing fainting and disempowerment was representative of the female social code of the South, and broader American life.

Through this project, Chan asks: who gets to be fragile in America, and who has to be strong? How are notions of “tradition” and “beauty” still used to codify violence? What should we do in moments when power is disguised as powerlessness?

And finally, what new patterns could we be forming?

Whose comfort and emotional safety should be considered in everyday life? In a symbolic reversal of the Fainting Couch’s historic exclusionary use, participants of all backgrounds were invited to decolonize the couch by freely claiming time, space and rest on it. Afterwards, all participants were invited to contribute to a community digital journal about what it means to be American in this present moment.

The couch - and the accompanying installation in various forms - has travelled to ICA San Francisco, Mills Art Museum, ICA San Jose, and will soon be a community project at the Luminary, St. Louis. As the project travels to different institutions, each participant’s video becomes a black and white square in a continuously growing community video “quilt”. The project aims to celebrate intergenerational storytelling as something that happens within our lived lifetimes. Even as fragility and racism are intergenerational, so too is storytelling driven by community voices. As a reflection of the ever-changing rise of political action and cultural expression, each location of the project is intended to represent one generation of the project. Below: Video of Fainting Couch participant projected on Mills Hall, Oakland

Related Works

Flag Building, 2022

Assemblage of letters and community-driven actions from 2015-2022 responding to gaslighting or whitewashing in the arts. Flag was updated throughout exhibition.

But That Was So Long Ago, 2022

Modified reproductions of 2022-era U.S. state documents that banned critical race theory and the teaching of race in public schools. The papers were aged using a combination of heat, soil, and sunlight. In some cases, these records were difficult to obtain through accessible citizen processes and were requested through The Freedom of Information Act. The year 2022 was the first year that state education bans of this kind formally into affect; at the time of exhibition 15 states had passed bans. Currently in 2024, 23 U.S. states have bans on the teaching of critical race theory and / or the narration of U.S. history through the perspectives of non-white citizens.