A performance installation by Mi Elfverson
Adelaide Salon | Brighton, May 2025
THE EXHIBITION
Externum was an immersive exhibition exploring dynamics between the externum (the outer world) and internum (the inner self), through Paulina Anzorge’s art work and performance art collaboration inviting the audience to participate.
Internum – Covered Emotions by Photographer Mi Elfverson, invited participants and viewers to confront what is often concealed: our emotional interior lives, shaped by centuries of suppression, social expectation, and unseen labour.
This installation explores the tension between visibility and invisibility. What do we cover to survive? What parts of ourselves have never been uncovered? Beneath a fluid red sheet, each body becomes a silent force — expressing not just emotion, but history, resistance, and transformation. Together they become a small dictionary of our Covered Emotions.
Installation Statement
At the centre of the room stands a double bed — intimate, familiar, symbolic. The bed where we’re born, broken, healed, loved, violated, and restored.
A fine, red, fabric covers the bed.
Visitors are invited to choose an Emotion Slip from a glass jar. Each slip holds a word: grief, rage, desire, fear, shame, hope, resistance… They step into the bed and once beneath the cover, they are asked to embody that emotion. No words, no faces — just form, motion, and stillness. The red cover becomes a metaphor for societal layers: thick enough to obscure, yet thin like a wide open body, spilling its emotions on the canvas.
Overhead, a camera is suspended in a fixed bird’s-eye rig. It captures each participant in this private, performative moment from above. The resulting photographs, cropped to the frame of the bed, resemble red reliefs, body casts, emotional fossils — frozen traces of unseen truths.
“Internum – Covered Emotions” is not just an artwork; it is a participatory protest. It is a conversation between self and society, emotion and expression, exposure and protection.
It asks us: What have you covered to stay safe? And what might happen if you uncover it now?
