Body-Mind-Soul

Text image article on the work of artist Heather Agyepong. Co-authored with Agyepong's work/images, the piece considers Agyepong's work in light of trauma and the black body, Jungian psychoanalysis and the ideas of bell hooks.

This article was a part of a co-guest edited issue of Widok/View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture with Katarzyna Bojarska.

In this issue of "View" we are interested in the tension between the work of psychoanalysis through images and the work of images deciphered through psychoanalytic figures, concepts and clinical practice. When preparing the texts, we were guided by the assumption that the formation of the subject never takes place outside the world of images, and therefore involvement in psychoanalytic theory and practice in visual studies and in various studies of the visual arts is not so much a matter of choice, but rather an obligation.

We were interested in how psychoanalysis (theory and practice) functions today within a multidimensional "image culture", where not only individuals, but also communities are formed, deformed and reformed by visual media and visual exchange. We were interested in what role various images, imagination and imagery play in today's psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, and how our contemporary understanding of the complexity of the human psyche and relationality depends on the visual. How do we sublimate and repress as people creating and receiving images on such a scale? What are our defense mechanisms, dreams and delusions? Memories and flashbacks? Needs, desires and demands? And how do they function in the sphere of the image: through, among others, mental processes of repression and condensation, remembering, repeating and working through, bearing witness, transference and countertransference? How have our personal political and cultural awareness of intersectional subjectivities influenced the understanding of the image in psychoanalytic theory and practice in the ever-changing psychosocial landscape of the world in which we live? Has this changed what role images can play in our work for equality and social justice?

This issue of Widok/View includes work by Heather Agyeponog, Joan Copjec, Maria Walsh, Katarzyna Oczkowska, Malgorzata Stepnik, Mischa Twitchin, Katarzyna Przyluska-Urbanowicz, Jakub Momro, Gavin Edmonds, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Katarzyna Bojarska, Erns van Alphen and Joanne Morra.

• https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2...
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IOiMqLZ...