Catalogue > At random

Sigmund Freud and a Tyrant take a journey together on a boat into the mountains. My video work, ‘Mountain’, investigates Sigmund Freud’s connection to the neighbouring villages of Berchtesgaden and Schönau am Königssee, in Bavaria, Germany, where he often spent his holidays between the late 1800s and 1929. In a rented house in Schönau, Freud wrote his seminal work ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1898. The region is infamous as the base for the National Socialists. Hitler and Freud are reported to have been in the small village of Berchtesgaden at least twice in the 1920s at the same moment, a relatively unknown historical fact. In making ‘Mountain’, I have explored theories Freud examined in Group ‘Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921), specifically his theories about mass psychology and the supplantation of the super-ego with the will of the Tyrant. His personal connection to the historical character of Hannibal, and neurosis about reaching Rome, alluded in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1899), are also reflected in the work. The footage was taken from a boat launched at Schönau am Königssee steered through the mountains to St Bartholomew. This trip was one Freud did almost daily, in a wooden boat rowed by ‘four strong local women’, while on holiday in the region.

Pilar Mata Dupont is an Argentinean/Australian artist based between Australia and the Netherlands working in video, installation, performance, and photography. Using highly theatrical and cinematic methods, she uses allegory and narrative to reimagine/rework histories and classical texts, and aims to create alternative readings that question the conditions of the construction of dominant narratives that shape history. In 2015, she won the Plymouth Contemporary Open in the UK, and the Wexner Center for the Arts residency prize at the ‘19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil’ in São Paulo. Her solo exhibition, ‘Kaiho’, opened in the Rappu space at the Pori Art Museum, Finland in 2014. Other recent exhibition highlights include the ‘SeMA Biennale – Mediacity Seoul’, at the Seoul Museum of Art and ‘Salon Fluchthilfe’, at Secession in Vienna and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. In 2012 she was a recipient of a Mid-career Fellowship from the Western Australian Government. In collaboration with Tarryn Gill, she participated in the Sydney Biennale and won the Basil Sellers Art Prize in 2010, and as part of collective Hold Your Horses, she made work commissioned by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2012 for the exhibition ‘Wagner 2013: Künstlerpositionen’.