Valerie Schmidt  is an artist, photographer and professor based in Germany. Her practice explores the body as a site of physical and psychological affect, working at the intersection of photography, performance and visual theory. Through staged and performative situations, she examines gesture, movement and bodily expression, questioning the legibility of body language and the relationship between conscious and unconscious action. Her work approaches photography as an experimental process of constructing images and exploring emotional thresholds, perception and empathy.

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Deleting Babiński


Valerie Schmidt’s Deleting Babiński can be understood as an intervention into the visual dispositif that Georges Didi-Huberman describes in Invention de l’hystérie as the construction of a tableau clinique: an orchestrated arrangement in which the female body is not simply observed, but transformed through the mechanisms of looking into a symptôme visuel. André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887) serves as a paradigmatic document of this dispositif. It reveals Charcot’s theatrical production of truth, his staging of hysteria as an image that does not merely diagnose, but is performatively produced. The patient Blanche (Marie Wittman) appears as the embodiment of a ressemblance—not of an individual experience of suffering, but of an aesthetically and medically produced visual formula. The moment of fainting—that instant of “withdrawal” and theatrical surrender into the arms of the male physician—is simultaneously an act of image production and an act of power.


Schmidt’s eight-part photographic series dismantles this historicised visual constellation by isolating the falling female figure and transforming it into a sculptural bodily form. The moment of transition into unconsciousness—or rather, the moment in which this transition is performatively enacted—is frozen through the photographic interruption of movement. The poses appear rigid, yet emerge from a highly dynamic sequence; they oscillate between loss of control and a choreographed gesture of collapse. In doing so, the work points to the historical visual practices surrounding hysteria, which systematically constructed the female subject as an aesthetically rendered bearer of symptoms: a body exposed to the scrutinising and investigating gaze.

The medical invention, aestheticisation, and popularisation of hysteria in the nineteenth century produced a symptomatic iconography in which women were represented almost exclusively as suffering, unconscious, or vulnerable beings—always framed by male authority, expertise, and control. This visual tradition not only reinforced clinical power relations, but also functioned as a cultural template that associated femininity with vulnerability, excess, and irrationality.

Schmidt’s work subverts this structure by removing the male support from the image and thereby destabilising the epistemic foundation of the historical representation. In her fall, the protagonist now holds herself; the once-functional male hands remain only as obscure, almost decorative residues, no longer able either to protect or to control. The established iconography of the fainting gesture thus shifts: it becomes a paradoxical pose of autonomous imbalance, a form of self-assertion in the very moment of presumed loss of control.

Deleting Babiński is therefore not merely a critical rereading, but an epistemic counter-figure to Brouillet’s tableau clinique. The series transforms the iconographic tradition of hysteria from a space of male authorisation into a site of visual instability and the production of knowledge. It demonstrates that the hysterical image—the image of the apparently involuntary body sinking towards the ground—is not closed or complete, but remains open to new montages, new meanings, and new Pathosformeln.

In this sense, Schmidt works very much in the spirit of Didi-Huberman: she does not allow the historical image to rest, but makes it tremble.

Dr. Kerstin Stremmel
        













installation view
Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, 2024
installation view Reconstructing Photography, EMOP
Kunsthalle trier, 2025




installation view Antithese, Pernerinseln, Hallein, Austria, 2024