Lecture Announcement

Curator's Talk

Resonance: Overlay: Interweave
What has Bracha Ettinger created in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration?

2.30-4.00pm Sunday 26 July
(No charge or booking)

Why install art in the Freud Museum already so rich with artefacts and images?

Why place the works of this artist in this museum of psychoanalysis?

Is it an exhibition in the museum, or an installation that is in dialogue with the memories held in this space?

This talk will explore what the painter Bracha Ettinger has 'done' by creating a unique, multi-faceted installation which is much more than a mere exhibition in these spaces. It will ask: what is brought to light in this encounter between the varied works of a contemporary artist who is herself so deeply engaged with psychoanalysis and the freighted spaces the last home and archives of the exiles a father and his daughter, one a collector of antiquities, the other a weaver.

Bracha Ettinger has created an installation that weaves many strings between her own history and memory and the world from which the Freuds fled. It treats of European pasts and present struggles for futures despite the freight of traumatic memory. Through allusion and translation into artworking, Ettinger's work explores aspects of Freud's own practice and theory especially in relation to the feminine and the obscured mother.

Another contribution to the tradition of the many extraordinary exhibitions by contemporary artists at the museum, Bracha Ettinger's work, however, holds a special place because this was an installation waiting to happen: in both her own artwork between aesthetics, psychoanalysis and history and in the museum's own relations through images and things, objects and books to history, memory and above all, the family.

The curator, distinguished art historian and cultural theorist, Griselda Pollock will present a double reading of the exhibition as a conversation between both Anna and Sigmund Freud and Bracha Ettinger's work, linking Freud's last great work Moses and Monothesism (1939) and his own diary (1929-39) with Ettinger's notebooks and those of her father (1942-45), Freud's objects and her mother's spoon, the Freudian family albums and hers, Freud's texts and hers. As the exhibition closes, this is a last chance of engage with the materiality, affects and insights created in the installation as poetic event.

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk