Bracha L. Ettinger

Bound with RESONANCE OVERLAY INTERWEAVE.

On 2 June 2009, the exhibition Resonance, Interweave, Overlay: Bracha L. Ettinger in the Freudian space of Memory and Migration opened at the Freud Museum, London. Griselda Pollock was the curator. An unforeseen event-encounter occurred when Bracha L. Ettinger ‘artworked’ with this space freighted with the traces and memories of both Sigmund and Anna Freud, their histories of forced exile and of psychoanalytical thought. This event-encounter created a ‘time-space’ that necessitated a new form of art writing, after the event, to catch up and retrace some of the many strings–historical, aesthetic and psychical–that were interwoven between the artist, who is equally a theoretically innovative psychoanalyst reshaping both theories of the aesthetic and of sexual difference and subjectivity, and the histories and traumatic after-affects represented by the Freuds’ now museal memorial home in London. Griselda Pollock offers a sustained analysis of the artwork(ing) of Bracha Ettinger from her early engagements in the 1980s with archival traces of trauma through her deviation of the blind technology of the photocopy which created co-inhabited spaces of memory and trauma to the densely saturated abstract paintings of the early twenty-first century, placing her profound explorations of post-conceptual abstract painting in conversation with her major contemporaries to counter the predominantly melancholic tone of their painting.
At the intersection of contemporary art, psychoanalytical theory and the urgencies of anguished histories, Bracha Ettinger’s artworking and art-thinking enters into a Matrixial alliance with Griselda Pollock’s artwriting–signalled in this double volume of a richly illustrated text and a virtual installation.