Panic (2025)

PANIC is an immersive installation that addresses the experience of panic disorder and extreme anxiety. The work invites the viewer into a confined, black-painted booth where multiple sensory elements – sound, smoke, strobe lights, vibrating bass frequencies, and spatial pressure – recreate the physical and emotional intensity of a panic attack. The soundscape includes heartbeat rhythms, internal bodily noises, alarming environmental sounds, and infrasonic frequencies that are felt rather than heard.

The piece is rooted in the artist’s personal history with panic attacks and aims to translate a private psychological experience into a shared, empathetic encounter. The updated version of the work situates the experience within a broader cultural context, reflecting how rapid societal change, loss of shared values, and the repression of one’s inner “shadow” can lead to anxiety, disorientation, and emotional numbness.

The intention is not merely to shock but to create a meaningful experiential journey. Visitors choose whether to enter and how long to stay, making them active participants. The work seeks to leave a lasting bodily impression – one that may prompt the viewer to reflect on their own emotional states with greater awareness, compassion, and understanding.

The Panic installation was exhibited at the Mänttä Art Festival 14.6.-31.8.2025

It’s hot. It’s so hot and bright, and the floor is pulsing. I don’t like: sudden noises, bright lights, heat, and tight spaces.

In the small, confined interior of Mikko Rekonen’s work, I am forced to consider what I do like. I like the darkness that, between the bright flashes, encloses me in a nameless state of being.

In fact, I start to like the heat as well. The small booth becomes a deprivation chamber, where so many things have been taken away from me that I too become reduced.

I lie on my back on the floor of the booth.

Amid all the noise, the floor is like the lap of a living being; it carries me over everything I do not want to experience.  – Raisa Jäntti