Biography
artist
historian
BIOGRAPHY
I am a scholar working across the fields of visual culture history, art theory and practice, the history of psychiatry, philosophy, and semiotics. Disciplinary mobility has been a defining feature of my career. After training in Art History and Arts/Design, I pursued an interdisciplinary PhD at the intersection of the History of Psychiatry and History of Art jointly at Lausanne University (UNIL) and the Institut des Humanités en Médecine (IHM/CHUV), Switzerland.
My research focuses on concepts of self and body awareness, perceptions, and their respective alterations. My interest has always gravitated toward liminal spaces: transitions, metamorphoses, intermodalities. Two threads run consistently through my work. The first is an interest in the body as the frame of the self and as a mediator between the inner world and external reality. The second is a focus on alternative aesthetics, especially the uncanny, the eerie, and forms of otherness. For my doctoral thesis, these two concepts naturally clustered around the fin-de-siècle period—a moment marked not only by profound aesthetic change but also by the re-evaluation of understanding the self. It investigates the phenomenology of altered experiences in psychopathology and their somatic and visual articulation in the radical iconography of Austrian self-portraiture.
I am particularly interested in how the self can be divided, externalized, or experienced as other, and in the mechanisms behind self-estrangement in historical, religious, and cultural contexts. This includes the phenomenon of the double—the experience of perceiving or becoming a second self—traced across cultural history, psychiatry, and neuroscience, with special attention to under-researched instances such as bilocation. The concept of double is closely linked to questions of identity, selfhood, death, and transformation; and most importantly, it reflects a broader theme: the human self is not a fixed point but a dynamic construct that can be experienced, represented, or observed in multiple loci simultaneously.
My profile includes work at the interface of academia and practice-oriented contexts, particularly through science–art initiatives, curatorial projects, and public interdisciplinary events.
I am the author of a unique teaching module, «Madness-Creativity Controversy: A Historical Interdisciplinary Retrospective» and currently teach it as a guest lecturer at universities throughout Europe.
My research focuses on concepts of self and body awareness, perceptions, and their respective alterations. My interest has always gravitated toward liminal spaces: transitions, metamorphoses, intermodalities. Two threads run consistently through my work. The first is an interest in the body as the frame of the self and as a mediator between the inner world and external reality. The second is a focus on alternative aesthetics, especially the uncanny, the eerie, and forms of otherness. For my doctoral thesis, these two concepts naturally clustered around the fin-de-siècle period—a moment marked not only by profound aesthetic change but also by the re-evaluation of understanding the self. It investigates the phenomenology of altered experiences in psychopathology and their somatic and visual articulation in the radical iconography of Austrian self-portraiture.
I am particularly interested in how the self can be divided, externalized, or experienced as other, and in the mechanisms behind self-estrangement in historical, religious, and cultural contexts. This includes the phenomenon of the double—the experience of perceiving or becoming a second self—traced across cultural history, psychiatry, and neuroscience, with special attention to under-researched instances such as bilocation. The concept of double is closely linked to questions of identity, selfhood, death, and transformation; and most importantly, it reflects a broader theme: the human self is not a fixed point but a dynamic construct that can be experienced, represented, or observed in multiple loci simultaneously.
My profile includes work at the interface of academia and practice-oriented contexts, particularly through science–art initiatives, curatorial projects, and public interdisciplinary events.
I am the author of a unique teaching module, «Madness-Creativity Controversy: A Historical Interdisciplinary Retrospective» and currently teach it as a guest lecturer at universities throughout Europe.
of
Art
/ historian of
Psychiatry
terekhova
irina