Contemporary art inside the Freud Museum: working-through transit documents, postmemory, and the Holocaust

A consideration of the contemporary art exhibitions at the Freud Museum London. The text is made up of several branches of research. The first is original research undertaken in the Freud Museum’s archives on the exhibitions by Ralph Freeman (painting), Vera Frenkel (video, installation), Vivian Koorland (painting) and Bracha Ettinger (painting, drawing, notebooks). Second, because each of these artist’s exhibition at the Freud Museum is connected to their personal and familial relationship to the Holocaust, the article considers and deploys Freud’s exile to London from Nazi Vienna in 1938, and his writings on memory and trauma as a means of contextualizing the artistic practices, and then focussing on a critical analysis of Freeman’s work. Third, the article opens up into an analysis of these exhibitions in light of research undertaken on the Holocaust on the formation of subjectivities from within trauma studies, and the concept of postmemory (the inheritance of trauma from a previous familial generation). The article also features a new concept, ‘site-responsive’: this is understood as the way in which an exhibition makes a critical intervention into a site which activates their meanings through a dialogue between the site, the works of art, artists and visitors.

Additional page numbers: 274-303 (Korean translation).