Contemporary Art and the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum London is internationally recognized as one of the most important sites for the history of psychoanalysis. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that over the past 25 years it has hosted over 70 contemporary art exhibitions by celebrated artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Matt Collishaw, Vera Frenkel and Sarah Lucas.

What is the purpose of these exhibitions? How do these artistic interventions animate the Museum? What can they tell us about psychoanalysis and contemporary art? Looking at selected previous exhibitions, as well as the forthcoming ‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’ show (opening on 22 October), this talk will address these questions and others.

Dr Joanne Morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins and a Founding Principal Editor of Journal of Visual Culture. Joanne has published widely on modern and contemporary art, critical theory and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Recently she curated the exhibition Saying It, with work by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Renate Ferro at the Freud Museum, London (2012). Joanne is presently completing the book Inside the Freud Museums: Art, Curating and Site-Responsivity (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

Current Exhibition:
‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’  22 October 2014 – 22 February 2015

The exhibition explores Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ideas on love and the libidinal drive with an innovative combination of Freud’s own art collection, his writings and letters, together with the response of contemporary artists Jodie Carey, Edmund de Waal, Rachel Kneebone and Hannah Collins.

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Image: Eros, Terracotta, Myrina, Asia Minor, about 330 BC, Possible 19th century copy. Museum number 3898. Image © Freud Museum London