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Turning into Night (Dark Room). Freud Museum London, exhibition series marking the centenary of Freud’s „The Interpretation of Dreams“

Turning into Night (Dark Room). Freud Museum London, exhibition series marking the centenary of Freud’s „The Interpretation of Dreams“
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    • Turning into Night (Dark Room). Freud Museum London, exhibition series marking the centenary of Freud’s „The Interpretation of Dreams“
    • Turning into Night (Dark Room). 100-Jahre „Traumdeutung“, Freud Museum, London
  • 2000
  • Ink jet print on paper, Polaroid, felt-tip pen
  • 56 × 82 cm
To mark the centennial of Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams,” Lois Weinberger did some interventions in the Freud Museum in London as part of the series known as “Free Association.” Weinberger made direct reference to the structure of the museum—as building and as historical and in part mythical place—to inscribe himself on the various levels: in Freud’s study, he covered the almost room-filling Persian carpet with a further smaller carpet, a piece of fabric whose pattern seemed to contrast in a strange way with cartographic lines that the artist had applied by means of an oil crayon. The lines designated the high-altitude strata of an imaginary landscape. Weinberger had added haphazardly, associatively selected concepts in this labyrinth system of lines. These concepts, taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “Myth and Meaning,” defined this “region” in analogy to the names of places, mountains or rivers. Weinberger’s video “Turning into Night” (1996) was shown in a showcase in which one usually finds Freud’s plant studies. This almost half-hour long video shows in real-time the transition from day to night in Weinberger’s former garden in Vienna which he refers to as the “area.” The camera moves ion slowly, continuously panning over the plants of this “area,” mainly ruderal plants that would be called “weeds” in a conventional garden spectrum. The video keeps showing an unspectacular, objective documentation of a “nature/culture” fragment with the original sounds from the surroundings until night fall no longer allows one to recognize anything. S.E.