Intimacy Unguarded: Gender, the Unconscious and Contemporary Art

Session 2

Barbara Visser

Adventures beyond the intellect

The most intimate aspects of the human subject are unconscious. This symposium examines the ways in which this material becomes the basis for contemporary art, critical writing and the dynamics of the consulting room. The speakers will provide a number of perspectives on the relationship between gender, the unconscious and intimacy. As well as first hand accounts from contemporary artists there will be a new reading of Marlene Dumas’ intimate art practice. The psychoanalytic process of ‘patient presentation’ will be examined, as well as how the process of being in analysis becomes inadvertently manifest when artists exhibit their work in the Freud Museum.

This symposium is hosted in collaboration with the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design research project Intimacy Unguarded, which examines the personal as material in contemporary art and writing

Barbara Visser - Adventures beyond the intellect

Barbara Vissers’ Manual Series is an artistic research project, which addresses different forms of psychological (self-) help since the beginning of the 20th century in a playful, critical and confrontational manner.

In this paper, Visser will elaborate on three different endeavours in this realm and show excerpts from these chapters: starting with a radical translation of a best-selling American self-help book; moving on to autobiographical fiction though the file of Client 8034; and then will share footage recently recorded at the Psychological Event Lab at the University of Barcelona developing radical experiments with body and mind perception by using VR (virtual reality) techniques to influence our inner voice.

Manual/1: Stop thinking, start living

Manual/2: Client 8034

Manual/3: Being Sigmund Freud

Barbara Visser studied photography and audiovisual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Cooper Union in New York and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. From 1992onwards her work is shown internationally.

Barbara Vissers’ work focuses on cultural and historical narratives and the form in which they become manifest through art, design, media and behaviour. Using photography, film, text and performance, her practice addresses the uncertain relationship between registration and dramatization, and plays with notions of authentic and constructed realities. By challenging existing modes of storytelling and image-making and questioning our memory and belief systems, Visser aims to provoke a new perception of what normality has rendered invisible.

She often collaborates with other creative practices, and is currently the chair of the Royal Netherlands Society for the Arts.

Visser has participated in the Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006), Manifesta, Trento, Italy (2008), Architecture Biennale, Dutch Pavillion, Venice, Italy (2010), Art Biennale, Dutch Pavillion group show (2011). In 2011 and 12 she’s written and directed the film C.K. (2012). Awards for her work include the Dutch Cultural Media Fund Documentary Award (2010), the dr. A. H. Heineken Award for art and science (2008) , David Roell Prize 2007 from the Prins Bernhard Foundation (2007). Since 2014 she is appointed as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts. She is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.