Afterwards

This exhibition explores the concept of ‘Nachtrglichkeit’, the term employed by Sigmund Freud to describe the phenomena of ‘deferred action’, where impressions, experiences or memory traces gain significance as a result of re-experiencing the event.'Afterwards' opens at the Mead Gallery.

Kivland’s exhibition articulates Nachträglichkeit in the arrangement – or retranscription – of a number of works of art and objects from established and younger artists alike. Pivotal to the exhibition is the painting by Sergei Pankejeff, one of Freud’s patients who recounted to Freud a dream of lying in bed and seeing the window open of its own accord to show white wolves sitting on the walnut tree opposite the window. Freud used this dream to assert the validity of psychoanalysis to examine childhood traumas embedded in the unconscious.

Through the work of established and younger artists ordinary objects are recast, rupturing a distinction between object and representation. A record plays, but only the applause between performances long over is heard . Bowl and vessel echo a friendship. The presence of a distant village is evoked and carving recasts the encounter with landscape. A drugged man sleeps in a taxi, taken on a journey to his past. There is a tour of a city that no longer exists. Freud dreams of Rome and another man also dreams, classifying, memorising, describing. The illusion of Venice is encountered here and there, blurring any originary moment. Gesture and thought, weather and place, coincide and retreat. Freud’s dream book is endlessly rewritten. A child dreams of wolves and many years later, paints his dream. Years later two children draw the dream of a wolfman. An island disappears in the fog. Surprising attention is drawn to the figures appearing in photographs taken by chance. Careful technique and lovely colour does not hide darker reality. A mother’s amateur sculptures are painted by her now adult son and find a correspondence in an architect’s sideline. Obvious fakes lend themselves to an examination of authenticity. A municipal dream is reconstructed as a series of educational models and violent tornados are painstakingly sketched, from an impossible observational position.