Conference Report

The conference Art, Identity and the Unconscious in the age of trans-nationalism was a collaborative project between the Freud Museum and Amna Malik of the Slade School of Art, London, and arose from Amna's research interests in identity politics, psychoanalysis and contemporary art practice.

The conference began with a film screening at Tate Modern. Documentaries and film-essays exploring memory, loss, nostalgia and the rhythms of culture and cultural dislocation were shown to a large appreciative audience. This was followed by a discussion with the artists chaired by Raimi Gbadamosi. The trans-national nature of the conference was reflected in the international group of artists; from Zagreb, South Africa and London.

The conference continued next day with a series of talks at University College London, chaired by art historian Professor Tamar Garb who has written extensively on feminist art practices and Jewish identity politics, in which psychoanalysis has played an important role. Since the mid 1990s debates concerning the politics of difference and the shared public sphere have centred on the need for a new form of humanism and universality. Professor Kaja Silverman illustrated this in her opening talk about the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács who incorporates home videos into his films to evoke the place of the personal within wider notions of narrative, history and memory. For Silverman his films offer an opportunity to rethink the wider politics of representation in which love can become redemptive.

The psychoanalyst Fakhry Davids is well known to many for his development of Franz Fanon’s writings on the psychoanalysis of race towards a broader interest in the notion of the 'internal racist'. For this conference he considered the ambivalent condition of young men who project their sense of not belonging onto radical organisations associated with aspects of fundamentalism. Alia Syed has been exploring through film the ambivalent condition of the diasporic subject, of belonging and not belonging. In this conference she showed her 1995 film Watershed that overlaps a spoken narrative of violent and murderous impulses with an erotic encounter between a couple, shot in close-up and in black and white. Syed prefaced the film with a short story in which she articulates the different voices of women and their experiences.

The conference was closed by Lubaina Himid with a performance Buy one, get one free that was written to coincide with her exhibition Naming the Money (2003), in which the hidden people and experiences behind the flow of global capital is revealed in the displaced identities of ordinary men and women that form the 'black Atlantic'. The final panel discussion chaired by Tamar Garb brought together the day’s speakers with the artists whose films were shown the previous evening at Tate Modern.

We would like to thank University College London and Slade School of Art for their generous sponsorship of this very successful conference.