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Heartquake

Identity and Otherness in the Face of Anxiety

This exhibition hopes to expose and to emphasize people’s emotional confrontation with their surroundings, and, through the prism of anxiety, to examine their responses as injurers and as injured, with the aim of understanding and influencing the social relations among population groups in the global era.

Anxiety is a major factor in how humans interact with their world. When this connection is examined, anxiety turns into a complex signifier; it is not limited to a person’s sense of helplessness when facing the reality of his life, on the contrary, it is potentially a constitutive force, both as a warning signal and as an existentialistic utterance through which man casts doubt on the meaning accorded to life.

The exhibition will focus a discourse on the tension between these two perceptions, by means of a diversity of works that examine the currents global, ethnic and national anxieties in a dialogue with Freud’s anxiety of ‘the Uncanny’

(Das Unheimliche) and find out how they challenge and subvert the private and collective contexts in which people act. The exhibition will attempt to identify the contribution of the artistic utterance to these themes, while examining anxiety and its expressions along two mutually complementary routes:

  1. Anxiety-provoking factors, private and collective. These factors are centered around trauma and repression of memory. The exhibition will look for distinctive moments in which art tackles the issues of repression and trauma, both on the interpretational levels and as part of the art work itself. This will make it possible to discuss issues such as the political influences that are embedded in the collective memory (and national amnesia) of historical events; the founding trauma that forms the basis of the birth of individuals and of states; the difficulty entailed in the ethical distinction between loss and absence; working through and acting out as ways of grappling with trauma; the reciprocal relations between perpetrator and victim; the ways in which the trauma causes the collapse of the dimensions of time (the confusion between what happened in the past and behavior in the present and the future), space, body and language (artistic as linguistic); and the traces of the memories of repressed and forcibly forgotten things that threaten to burst through the body and the home, personal and national.
  2. Anxiety-engendered cognitive and somatic responses. These include the scream, paralysis, aggression, reclusion, criticism, protest, nihilism. These responses, by groups or by individuals, are responses of struggle no less than of helplessness. The range of images to be shown in the exhibition will be selected in the context of a fruitful dialogue with contemplative texts by Sigmund Freud, Homi Bhabha, and Dominick LaCapra.

This exhibition follows our preceding exhibitions in the endeavor to bring together art, theoretical thought, and the visiting public, in order to formulate an ethical statement and to stimulate the taking of social and political responsibility.