Mental Load: performance and installation by Karen Vieira - Onsite Festival - Berlin

Mental Load by Karen Vieira, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Jeremy Knowles

By Flávio Rocha de Deus December 12th, 2025

A simple, functional hospital bed, stripped of ornament, over which hovers an organic mass of red and pink fabrics, almost pulsating. The encounter between the everyday object, meant for rest and recovery, and the amorphous, excessive form floating above it constitutes Mental Load (2025), an installation by Brazilian artist Karen Vieira, presented at ONSITE, a Site-Specific Art Festival that took place in various locations around Berlin from November 6 to 11.

Conceived and curated by Lucas Lacerda and Daniel Weyand, the festival is the result of a residency focused on experimentation and creation in dialogue with specific contexts. In Vieira’s case, this context was the Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, located within the Evangelical Hospital Queen Elisabeth Herzberge, in a wing dedicated to the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Thus, the work settles not only physically but symbolically in a place where body and mind are objects of care, management, and control.

The work engages with the discussion around mental load, a concept emerging from the feminist critique of Italian philosopher Silvia Federici concerning invisible labor and the affective and domestic management disproportionately placed on certain subjectivities, especially women and feminized bodies. Vieira had already addressed this dimension in Varas e velas ao vento (2023), a photographic series dedicated to documenting clothes and sheets hanging from windows. For the artist, what appears in these images is not merely fabric blowing in the wind, but traces of continuous, everyday, silent work, work that sustains life yet is rarely recognized as such. In Mental Load, this dimension ceases to be an indication and becomes substance: what was once a trace turns into body, weight, volume, an unavoidable presence.

Mental Load by Karen Vieira, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Jeremy Knowles

Here, the burden is not described, explained, or narrated: it is materially embodied. The suspended, sinuous, dense volume resembles an organism that is at once internal and external to the body, something like a thought turned into flesh, a burden that has taken on the form of a red cloud that never dissipates. In this sense, Vieira’s installation evokes theoretical considerations from psychoanalysis, where the mind is responsible for transforming raw emotional experiences into thoughts capable of being symbolized. When this capacity fails, what should be processed remains as indigestible psychic mass, unthought thoughts, shapeless emotions that accumulate and besiege the subject. By making this excess visible and tangible, the artist “materializes the invisible architecture of emotional and cognitive pressure that structures existence,” exposing not a sick body but an interrupted psychic operation: the moment when feeling ceases to be experience and becomes weight.

In her installation, Vieira also performs a durational action in which she sleeps, or attempts to sleep, on the bed itself, using a mask that connects her head directly to the suspended mass. Alongside the performance, Vieira presents a video in which her voice narrates thoughts and tasks overlapping in an uninterrupted flow, simulating the experience of a mind overtaken by mental load. Internal voices, lists of obligations, domestic, affective, and productive concerns accumulate without hierarchy and without pause.

Mental Load by Karen Vieira, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Jeremy Knowles

Here, the artist approaches procedures of video art as psychic diary, but what is narrated is not an intimate interiority; it is a subjectivity exhausted by its own social performance. At this point, Vieira illustrates the contemporary condition that South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as characteristic of the “burnout society”: no longer a society of prohibition, but of self-exploitation. There is no “other” who oppresses; there is an “I” forged by the continuous demand for performance, compelled to sustain everything, think everything, care for everything. Collapse here is not deviation, it is the logical consequence of a subjectivity summoned to be always available.

By placing this mass above the bed, the installation reveals a paradox: the social space destined for rest is also the stage where the burden intensifies. The bed, instead of offering respite, becomes the point of contact with what suffocates. This displacement aligns with accounts of a psychiatric hospitalization that inform the origin of the work, pointing to a curious irony: during a conversation with a patient admitted to a mental health clinic, the artist recalls her saying that, as a mother, the hospital was the only place where she could sleep in peace.

Mental Load by Karen Vieira, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Jeremy Knowles

The mask connecting the body to the installation during the performance is not merely illustrative but structural: it inscribes the artist’s body into the circuit of overload that the work exposes. The physical connection between artist and burden makes visible what, in everyday life, remains unseen: the fact that exhaustion does not detach from the body, does not move away, does not deposit itself elsewhere. It remains adhered to the skin, infiltrated into thought, hovering above it, accumulating over our heads, even if it is not immediately visible and palpable as in the installation.

In this sense, the installation does not aestheticize suffering; it politicizes it. It is not about expressing an individual interiority, but about inscribing subjective experience into the economic and social fabric that produces exhaustion. The predominant red may evoke flesh, blood, heat, and life, but here it also reveals what bleeds because it is being pushed beyond its limit: incessant emotional labor. The work reframes the problem of “mental health” not as personal failure but as a symptom of systems of control and exploitation that infiltrate the intimate. As the artist states, “wear is not an individual pathology, but a collective condition.”

Mental Load by Karen Vieira, Berlin, 2025.  Photo: Karen Vieira

Within this scope, the excellence of Mental Load lies precisely in the artist’s singular ability to articulate and bring into dialogue, with precision and restraint, elements that might at first seem irreconcilable: the bed and the burden, care and violence, rest and wakefulness, pulsating organicity and functional architecture, the intimate and the social. In this gesture, there is a movement of rare subtlety: what could have become a spectacle of pain becomes, instead, a quiet denunciation, an affirmation that what we live individually is, at its root, a shared condition. Thus, Vieira constructs a work that not only represents contemporary exhaustion but renders it visible. It does not offer answers or relief, but opens a space to clearly see what runs through so many of us. And it is in this visibility, built without melodrama and without concessions, that the work finds its strength.