In this deeply cathected space of memory and migration, the renowned Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger holds her first major exhibition in Britain since 1993.
5 Elements from archive, 2009, Bracha Ettinger
Recent paintings and never before exhibited notebooks, newly created collages and sound installations will engage in visual and acoustic dialogues both with this museum of psychoanalysis (that itself was created in the presence of so much art) and with the legacies of the traumatic events that brought the Freuds to Britain. The exhibition creatively entwines aesthetics, politics, cultural memory and psychoanalytical space and process.
Bracha Ettinger’s work began with painting an abjected and co-inhabited Israeli/Palestinian landscape haunted by intertwining catastrophes. Her layered paintings, soliciting and defracting what she names the matrixial gaze, visually negotiate the emerging understanding of processes of transsubjectivity and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Art for her becomes a means of transporting traumatic remnants to opened futures.
Placing Ettinger’s paintings in relation to the objects, spaces, diaries and photographs of the Freuds, the exhibition will also explore Freud’s writing, his laconic diary, and his last great text, a reflection on Jewish history and identity, and the source of a major theorization of trauma and culture and culture as trauma. This juxtaposition will ask: what has psychoanalytical thought, in an as itself, to offer to the anguish of unresolved histories and contemporary political conflicts?
Exhibition curated by Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH, Leeds)