Wednesday Society’s inspiration is derived from a setting usually not associated with the visual arts: the gathering of intellectuals in Sigmund Freud’s private reception room at Berggasse 19 in Vienna: (male) friends and colleagues convened there in the midst of Freud’s idiosyncratic collection of ancient Middle Eastern artworks on Wednesdays to discuss new concepts, methods, and ideas related to the emerging field of psychanalysis. Our Wednesday Society is the feminized version of that setting, an emerging place of power, exploring the “dark continent” of irregular, nonphallic, dispersed, poetic, and imaginary ways of thinking. Wednesday Society explores the spatial order of dreamwork, poetry, caress, and diplomatic coups. Centrally staged, the exhibition hosts a pop-up nineteenth-century salon, an in-situ scene in which the curator hosts special guests at regular hours in private conversation on her couch that are open to the public with two scribes projecting mural writings on the walls.
Istanbul artist Gülçin Aksoy’s Family Cemetery I Love invokes Freud’s study with his famous couch, inviting visitors to come face to face with their own ghosts. A poetry thread by Ana Sontag is spanned throughout the entire exhibition with poetic splinters by Meret Oppenheim, Rebecca Horn, Ibn Arabi, Hélène Cixous, the Talmud, Song of Songs, Fethi Benslama, Geneviève Morel, a.o. Artworks are displayed as fragmentary elements of space, including the work “dancing table,” a personal anthology of contemporary art dedicated to Beral Madra by House of Taswir.
Tony Chakar’s Madonna, The Discourse of the Last Things before the First, veils the secrets of the exhibition—it is the last room that is also the first.
A.S. Bruckstein, Istanbul, July 31, 2019
