The Unheimlich and Consciousness in Art

  • Imogen Racz (Speaker)

    Activity: Talk or presentationInvited talk

    Description

    Building on research from my recent book Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday, this talk will consider how post-war sculptors have addressed ideas of the domestic uncanny. In order for these works to have resonance viewers needs to empathetically engage, and allow for a blurring between consciousness and the material world. They project onto the objects and installations their own understanding of reality.

    Freud wrote about how relationships with the world and society are veiled by customs and accepted ideas of normality. His essay ‘The Uncanny’ discussed how feelings of dread and unease could be conjured and felt. This was influential with surrealist artists, but what will be discussed here are artists working later, but who show influence of those ideas, including Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Gregor Schneider.
    Period14 Jun 2016
    Held atFreud Museum London, United Kingdom

    Keywords

    • art
    • uncanny
    • home
    • alienation
    • interiority
    • memory