What is art without the asylum (from classical Latin asȳlum: refuge, sanctuary)? In François Pain’s first solo show in the US, three video displays, a mini-bookstore, and a vitrine of pamphlets compete for the viewer’s attention. At the center is a 2025 video installation comprised of nine screens featuring footage from protests, Pain’s films, interviews with experimental psychoanalysts and theorists (including Félix Guattari), and, notably, his cat walking across his book-cluttered desk. The film draws from Pain’s experience working at the clinic of La Borde, one of the sites of the Institutional Psychotherapy (IP) resistance movement initiated by Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, which fostered intermixing and non-hierarchical practices for those in mental health treatment. The other two videos play on televisions from the same time as the films they project: The Crystal Wave (1985) and Guattari’s The Green Notebook. This exhibition invites near-silent movement through the gallery while also offering places to sit before the videos, either in a single, poignantly placed vintage dining chair or in a long, industrial-sized chaise for many. Despite the various forms of content transmission—in line, perhaps, with the IP’s uses of alternative media, including a wall text of the show’s title, “PSYCHIATRY IS WHAT PSYCHIATRISTS DO,” and a film transcription and translation by Jesse Newberg—to be amongst Pain’s many offerings at Joan is to feel immersed in the impenetrable: to feel that what psychiatrists do is not what one herself does.