Setting Memory: Unsettling Memory

Vortrag auf Englisch von Joanne Morra
Donnerstag, 19. Jänner 2017, 20 Uhr, Sigmund Freud Museum, Lounge
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Paul Coldwell and Bettina von Zwehl?s site-responsive exhibition Setting Memory presents us with a series of evocative objects that work to unsettle memory. The exhibition evokes: Sigmund Freud?s use of archaeology as a metaphor within psychoanalysis; the clinical work of psychoanalysis and Anna Freud?s understanding of this as a creative process; and the difficult conditions under which Freud emigrated to London from Vienna in 1938, and the historical tragedy that thereafter ensued in Europe. By considering the critical intimacy between the evocative artworks within Setting Memory and the history and memory embodied in Berggasse 19, this talk will explore Freud?s insistence that memory is something ?that is still alive? in the present, undergoing ?rearrangement? and ?retranscription? from time to time, and that the work we do in the consulting room, unsettles our memories, as we slowly uncover and ?translate? the living traces of our fragmented memory in order to pave a way for self-understanding in the future.

Dr Joanne Morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She runs The Doctoral Platform at CSM, and is Founding Principal Editor of ‘Journal of Visual Culture’. She has published widely on modern and contemporary art in, for instance, ‘New Formations’, ‘Art History’, ‘Journal of Modern Art’, What is Research in the Visual Arts (eds. Holly & Smith). Joanne has edited many collections, including The Limits of Death (MUP 2000), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (MIT 2006), Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, 4 volumes (Routledge 2006), “Acts of Translation” with Mieke Bal (Sage 2007). Recent activities include the exhibition “Saying It” (Freud Museum London 2012), the 4-year research project ‘Intimacy Unguarded: Autobiography, Biography, Memoir’ (with Talbot, 2013 -), “50 Years of Art and Objecthood” (with Green, Sage 2017), and Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art (I.B. Tauris 2017).