The contemporary art section of the exhibition The Window and the Couch (that also contains a co-equal contemporary design section) playfully deploys aspects of the Freudian toolkit as it refers to popular culture and consciousness. We’re not seeking to strictly mirror history, the critique of Freud and his ideas (which are currently considered overly-patriarchal), or the strict relations of the analyst-and-analysand, instead we want to skate-the-surface of his biography and philosophy to produce an engaging, entertaining, sometimes keen, and occasionally amusing exhibition over which we hope the ghost of Sigmund Freud — who happened to live and work just up the road before his enforced exile to London — might chuckle and smile.

Sigmund Freud offers us a helluvah — never less than dreamy — toolkit to dip into. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in the space between the window and the couch. Concepts, including: Automatic drawing / The Avian (birds) / Cigars / Carpets / Cancer / Couches / Courtly Love /Displacement / Dreams / Drugs / Exile / Family / Fetish / Forests / Freud in popular culture /Freudian slips / Group therapy / Homesickness / Masks / Myth / Memory / Nostalgia / Oedipalcomplex / Orality / Play / Sex / Students and progeny / Subject-Object relations / Taboos /Totems / Unheimlich – Uncanny / Unstable identity / Wolves (Sergei Pankejeff’s “Wolf Man dream sequence”) …

Artist List: Julia Beliaeva [UA]; Norbert Brunner [AT]; Paz Corona [FR]; Anne Deleporte [FR/US]; Barbara Hainz [AT]; Daniel Horowitz [FR/US]; Noémi Kiss [HU]; Birgit Knoechl [AT]; Monica C. LoCascio [AT/US]; Andrew M. Mezvinsky [US/AT]; Luīze Nežberte [LV]; Marcel Odenbach [DE]; Elisabeth Penker [AT]; Eva Petrić [SI/US]; Ana Pravački [DE/RS]; Roland Reiter [AT]; Stephan Reusse [DE]; Frances Ruyter [AT/US]; Denise Schellmann [AT]; Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber [AT]; Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas [US/LT]; Ben Wadler [IL/AT]; Kay Walkowiak [AT]