Episodes
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
Lament: Bettina von Zwehl in conversation with Josh Cohen
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
Lament: Bettina von Zwehl in conversation with Josh Cohen
Lament is a new publication by Art/Books, which features two series of images by artist Bettina von Zwehl with new writing by psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. Cohen’s two texts are interwoven amongst the images, one a critical reflection on light and shadow, the other a poetic tale inspired by the torn photographs.
This evening they will discuss both the publication and von Zwehl’s exhibition Invitation to Frequent the Shadows, on display at the Museum 7 June – 17 July 2016.
Lament is published by Art/Books (July, 2016). Available from the Museum shop.
Bettina von Zwehl lives and works in London. She has an MA Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art and BA (Hons) Photography from the London College of Printing. Recent solo exhibitions include Album 31, (with Sophy Rickett), 2015, Fotogaleriet, Oslo, Norway, touring to The Library of Birmingham, UK; Purdy Hicks, London (2014 and 2011); Road to 2012, Setting Out, commissioned by National Portrait Gallery, London, 2010; and The Photographers’ Gallery, 2005. Group exhibitions include Facing Histories, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2015; Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, National Gallery, London and touring to Fundacio La Caixa, Madrid, Spain, 2012 and In Repose, The Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia El Cuerpo (con) sentido: una (re)presentación visual, Centro de Historia, Zaragosa, 2008. Her work is held in many collections including Arts Council, London; British Council, London; Sammlung Spallart, Salzburg, Austria; Guggenheim, New York and Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
Josh Cohen is a practising psychoanalyst and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (2013), which won the BMA Board of Science Chair’s Choice Award for 2014 and was longlisted for the JQ/Wingate Literary Award, How to Read Freud (2005), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (2003) and Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (1998). He writes regularly for the TLS, Guardian, Prospect and New Statesman and is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
The Unheimlich and Consciousness in Art
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
Tuesday Jul 19, 2016
Building on research from my recent book Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday, this talk will consider how post-war sculptors have addressed ideas of the domestic uncanny. In order for these works to have resonance viewers needs to empathetically engage, and allow for a blurring between consciousness and the material world. They project onto the objects and installations their own understanding of reality.
Freud wrote about how relationships with the world and society are veiled by customs and accepted ideas of normality. His essay ‘The Uncanny’ discussed how feelings of dread and unease could be conjured and felt. This was influential with surrealist artists, but what will be discussed here are artists working later, but who show influence of those ideas, including Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Gregor Schneider.
Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday is published by I.B.Tauris (January, 2015). Available from the Museum shop.
Dr Imogen Racz is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at Coventry University. She has published two books and written many articles. Her recent book Art and the Home; Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday, (I. B. Tauris 2015) is a thematic investigation into how post-war artists interpreted the abstract concepts that we have about the home, including enclosure, alienation, sentiment, female space, and the unmade house. Her current research has been focusing on the sculptor and photographer Helen Chadwick, placing her work of the 1980s into its artistic, theoretical and social contexts. This forms part of a larger, ongoing exploration of 1980s sculptural practices in Britain, especially that of women artists.