Invitation to Frequent the Shadows
Artist Bettina Von Zwehl has created a series of intriguing silhouettes of a young girl to populate the stairwell and rooms of London’s Freud Museum. Fragments of the same photograph, torn and re-torn, create a framework of possibilities for imagining who this young girl is, but also why, like a revenant, she has come to haunt the home of the legendary analyst. In a book accompanying the exhibition, there are some hints as to what is happening. Psychoanalyst John Cohen asks: “What place does shadow have in the world?” The hidden might be a necessary dimension of reality, he argues; it might even be said that a person can be revealed as much darkness and shadow as by light. Writing about things that have been hidden for decades, terrible crimes, dreadful repression, the tendency is to think about how it might be revealed - what outlets for representation, or debate. And now another possibility is suggested to me for developing ideas around the relationship between death and art. A quote by Tanizaki is included in Cohen’s essay and this has become my guide to thinking about how best to represent a mass grave, one that has been concealed for over seventy years, but its traces still visible on the landscape, and its occupants revenants in the dreams of those who live close by:
“In the mansion called literature, I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back in the shadows the things that come forward too clearly.”
It is not a case of concealing the truth, but enabling perceptions of a violent past filter through images of shadow, where desperate memories and painful emotions lie, rescuing them in a story that gives full measure to the whole dimension of reality.