This exhibition will take place at The Science Museum, South Kensington

‘The Unconscious in Everyday Life’ (working title) is an exhibition that celebrates psychoanalysis today. Psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge of the mind and of human culture. (David Bell) It deals with the relationships between conscious and unconscious mental processes. As a body of knowledge, psychoanalysis is central to this exhibition at the Science Museum.
Psychoanalysis is revealing of the ways in which we speak, the ways in which we act, and the ways in which we feel and respond to situations. Why do I make the same mistakes over and over again? Why do I always choose the wrong relationship? Why do I never get the name
of this person right? What are the dark impulses that shape conflict and violence? All of us have wondered about similar questions and looked for an understanding of themselves and others.
Psychoanalysis offers us a model for such an understanding not only for pathological conditions but also in everyday life. It is part of our culture and examples surround us all.

By looking at the underlying themes of
Playing / Object Relations / The Uncanny

The exhibition aims to create an imaginative environment that foregrounds relations between conscious and unconscious thoughts, images, and emotions some overt and some veiled, some interpreted by the voice of leading psychoanalysts and scientists and some for the audience to unravel.

Unheimlich
Das unheimliche, or the uncanny is in Freud’s definition, The class of frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar – Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, (1919).
Articulating a frisson between the known and the unknown with the uncanny, Freud describes a situation in which repressed material of the unconscious or primitive beliefs – as forms of the past – re-emerge to destabilise the perception of objects and of the subject alike. Doppelgänger, disembodiment, déjà vu, unexpected moments of disorientation are all manifestations of the uncanny.
Technology also plays a role in destabilising the perception and relation to reality and the digital is recognised as a potent site of the contemporary Unheimlich. Digital games are a repository of uncanny tropes within the very contemporary setting of alter ego avatars, hyperreal settings and the timeless dimension of the game.
We have discussed the development of a digital artwork specially for the exhibition with artist Sonny Sanjay Vadgama. The work is a collaboration with a psychoanalyst expert in the Uncanny recommended by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. It is aimed to explore this disturbing and topical psychoanalytical concept using the language of video games. Web images dealing with news and other current items, will interweave with the digital dimension of the game. The work personifies alienating experiences of crime and or /war through a life story.