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Abstract
Art, literature and psychoanalysis are concerned with the unrepresentable, making silence heard, darkness visible. They share a "commonality of experience", and the uncanny, as described by Freud, is a fundamental component of that commonality. This also includes the bleakness of borderline experience, uncertainty, anxiety, aloneness, silence; the reception of an artwork may evoke or touch or awaken in ways that may be difficult to understand or even bear. Psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable, but they are separated by their own individual and contrasting ways of making the attempt. The artist Sharon Morris will explore these ideas with the psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon.
Speaker biographies
Gregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Originally from Argentina, he moved to England in 1970, where he studied and worked with R.D.Laing and his colleagues of the anti-psychiatry movement. He qualified as an analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1979. From early 1988 to December 1994, he lived in Australia, where he co-founded (together with Valli Shaio Kohon) and directed The Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies.
He edited The British School of Psychoanalysis - The Independent Tradition (1986), and The Dead Mother - The Work of André Green (1999). He also published No Lost Certainties to be Recovered (1999) and Love and its Vicissitudes (co-authored with André Green) (2005). His novel Papagayo Rojo, Pata de Palo was a Finalist in the 2001 Fernando Lara Prize, Editorial Planeta, Barcelona [English translation: Red Parrot, Wooden Leg (2007, 2008)]. Kohon has also published four books of poetry in Spanish. In 2015, he published Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience - Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny, and a collection of short stories in Spanish, Truco Gallo (co-authored with Mario Flecha and Viqui Rosenberg).
Sharon Morris is an artist and poet, born in west Wales, trained in photography and video at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she is currently Deputy Director and Head of the Doctoral programme. She also holds an MA in psychoanalytic theory from Middlesex University.
Her research is concerned with the relationship between words and images and is best described as cross-disciplinary. Her photography, film and video installations have been shown at various galleries and institutions including Camden Arts Centre and Rowing, 2013, and she has performed her texts with projections at art and literary venues including the South Bank Poetry Library, 2015, the Mission Gallery, Swansea, 2014. Enitharmon Press have published two volumes of her poetry, False Spring, 2007, and Gospel Oak, 2013, and she is currently working on a series of artist's books for an exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, 2017.
Bringing together psychoanalytic theory and the semiotics of American philosopher C.S. Peirce, she has given conference papers and written essays for journals and collections within the fields of photography, visual art, film studies, semiotics and poetry. Her recent critical writings appear in Inside the View: Helen Sear, Ffotogallery, 2012; 'Peirce and the Image: Re-staging the Sign', RS•SI Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry, 2015.