Voice.  In Freud’s study, the artist situates seven ‘voices’ (audio recordings) of South African personalities who have all publicly expressed feelings on or about shame.  Antjie Krog, author of Country of My Skull, a semi-fictionalised novel based on her role as a reporter for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), reflects on this experience as well as more personal aspects of shame.  Edwin Cameron, a judge and AIDS/Gay activist, speaks of his personal experience of being HIV positive and the stigma associated with AIDS and sex in Africa.  Playwright and comedian Irene Stephanou speaks about shame, honour and female sexuality in a traditional Greek context, while also reflecting on her personal experience of multiple sclerosis.  Pumla Gobodo-Madikezela, a clinical psychologist and TRC counsellor, reflects on a specific case involving the sexual assault of an older black woman by young white security-force men.  Kgmotso Matsunyane, editor of South African Oprah magazine, discusses the sexual abuse of children from a personal perspective.  Fatima Meer, well-known sociology professor and detainee of the apartheid regime, describes torture during political detention as well as more personal memories of ‘shame’, while Paul Verryn, Bishop of the Methodist Church in Johannesburg, and activist priest in the apartheid era, speaks of his personal role in the TRC hearings.  In these reflections, voice acts as an agent to counteract shame – a way of regaining one’s sense of self. 

Myth.  The second intervention, installed in Freud’s dining room, incorporates a series of objects, artworks and film combined to orchestrate a chain of associations reflecting the psycho-sexual state of shame in its broader cultural context.  A little known terracotta figurine in Freud’s collection of antiquities is the trigger for these associations.  The figurine (probably of Egyptian origin) depicts a squatting woman exposing her genitalia.  This provocative pose is identified with the character of Baubo of Greek mythology; a servant woman who is said to have exposed herself to Demeter to cheer up the goddess after her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades and incarcerated in his underworld.  The three essays.  In considering such issues, the exhibition comprises three interventions into the intimate spaces of Freud’s house: 

Shame is often specifically associated with women.  In his essay "Femininity" (1933), Freud writes that “shame, which is considered to be a feminine characteristic par excellence but is far more a convention than might be supposed, has as its purpose… concealment of genital deficiency” (p. 132).  However, in the Greek myth of Baubo, such exposure is an act of humour and agency.  Far from embarrassing or shaming either the maidservant or the goddess, Baubo’s act is singularly responsible for lifting Demeter out of her depression. Yet while such an act of ‘revelation’ may exhibit elements of empowerment, it is still an act performed by one in servitude.  Indeed, arguably such an act could only be acceptably performed by someone with a diminished social standing, in which certain social norms of ‘civilised’ behaviour may not be expected or can under certain circumstances be acceptably transgressed. 

Alongside Baubo, a number of trans-cultural object associations are arranged in antique closets lining the room, the doors of which are flung open in an act of exposure.  These include a reproduction of a 19th century print of the ‘Hottentot Venus’; a collection of media documents dealing with a 1996 South African political/aesthetic controversy, regarding an artwork popularly dubbed ‘the black vagina’; a page torn from Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex; a collection of surreal ‘object assemblages’ of bodies.  Sparking the process of ‘free association’, the objects intentionally remain unlabelled and uncategorised.  These are not intended to represent museum objects, carefully named and described.  Rather, they represent links made by the mind’s eye and are potentially endless in their ability to inspire further (trans-cultural) connections.  The film included in the installation, To Walk Naked (Dirs. Meitjes, Maingard and Thompson), is a short documentary about a 1990 incident in apartheid South Africa in which a group of black women stripped in front of white policemen intent on bulldozing their homes.  Here, exposure may be viewed as both a weapon of resistance, invoking the shame of the onlooking policemen, and a trigger, in retrospect of feelings of indignity in the women as they reflect on their act. 

Memory.  The final installation is staged in what was once Freud’s bedroom, comprising paintings and personal items belonging to Freud.  These works, which give form to the imaginative realm of shame, condense all the complex and contradictory qualities of shame as it specifically relates to sexuality.  The paintings comprise deeply intimate portraits of shame, seemingly imaged through the memory of a child.  Shame here is pictured as a moment of lost innocence.  Bruised, quietly violent, these are images of flesh and blood.  Like Rorschach ink blots, these paintings invite unconscious associations, and indeed the unconscious is built into their very making.  As Siopis says, “they begin formless, splashes or drips of coloured liquid that run and pool…  This matter becomes suggestive, connecting with thoughts and feelings pressing against my consciousness, and invite an unfolding of these thoughts onto and into the paint surface.  The memories formed in this way are troubling in their status as real or imagined, very much like the controversy surrounding Freud’s seduction theory.”

The paintings form a frieze around Freud’s death bed.  Death symbolises both a marker of absence and the erasure of memory (and the body), and the point at which memory via processes of memorialisation begins.  While death marks profound loss, there is also hope in death – it is simultaneously an ending and the point at which something new may begin.
 

In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud discusses guilt as the force that, via the super ego or ‘conscience’, actively curbs and directs social action, crediting it as the internalised psychic function that marks the emergence of advanced civilisation.  Here, our instinctual aggression (“the greatest impediment to civilisation”) is redirected back onto the ego, and the resulting guilt expresses itself as a “need for punishment”.  However, while shame is certainly related to guilt, it may be seen to differ significantly in that shame affects the individual’s perception of the ‘whole’ self, rather than remorse felt in relation to a specific action of the self.  Moreover, shame is not simply an internalised authority, it is relational.  It is always felt – or inflicted – in relation to a community against which the self is both internally and externally measured in reference to an ideal.
 

Alongside national forums such as the TRC, more intimately expressed feelings of shame have found a voice post-1994 in confessional modes of art and literature.  One need not have taken direct part in past violations for shame to take hold, for complicity takes on many guises.  It is enough to have borne witness to history.  But while shame negatively acts to expose a deficiency in the self, it simultaneously and positively functions to draw attention to our shared humanity.  Siopis writes, “The things that shame us might vary across cultures, but the self-exposure involved usually draws something out that encourages us to recognise the pain of shame in others and empathise with situations not immediately (culturally) our own.”