The Uncanny within Visual Arts — August Ruhs
Video
Color is both the starting point and the end point for Katherine Bradford, used to depict both diverse communities and the individuals who constitute them. Interweaving abstraction with figuration, Bradford’s fantastic worlds are almost divided into two colorcategories: bright, colorful, optimistic scenes; and darker, more obscure paintings dealing with states of loss, isolation and loneliness.
While her brighter paintings might be understood as a metaphor for surface consciousness, it is possible to argue that the darker, melancholic paintings represent the hidden fears, longings and uncanny sensations of the unconscious.
In this lecture, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist August Ruhs will examine notions of the uncanny within visual arts. Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny (1919), the experience of the weird and the eerie is subject to a profound analysis. According to Ruhs, Freud’s notion of the uncanny is related to fear, but is closer to the unsettling and threatening. Ruhs suggests that we encounter repressed ideas, unconscious experiences and their recurrence as a series of opposites that allow the familiar and the strange, doubt and certainty, the living and the dead to emerge as disturbing entities with the experiential character of premonitions, omens and magical thinking. Ruhs’ aim is to show that, in addition to spontaneous everyday experiences of the uncanny, artistic, literary and technological creations are also capable of producing such effects, since, the uncanny is an inherent device of fiction, art and the artificial.The lecture starts at 6 pm in the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark.
Artists
Participating artists
August Ruhs
Professor, Dr med, specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapeutic medicine, psychoanalyst (IPV), group psychoanalyst, psychodrama teacher therapist. Deputy Head of the University Clinic for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy at the Medical University of Vienna until 2011.
From 2007 to 2015 and from 2019 to 2023 Chairman of the Vienna Working Group for Psychoanalysis (IPA), co-founder and Chairman of the “New Vienna Group/Lacan School”, co-editor of the journal “texte. psychoanalyse. ästhetik. kulturkritik”. Numerous publications and translations in the field of clinical, theoretical and applied psychoanalysis.
More contributions
Kathy Rae Huffman
FROM CYBERFEMINISM
UNTIL NOW
Video
Kathy Rae Huffman’s lecture traces the evolution of cyberfeminism since the 1990s: it connected women in the digital sphere, challenged existing power structures, and presented examples — from VNS Matrix to contemporary digital activism — that highlight critiques of platform corporations, AI cultures, and global inequalities.
Kathy Rae Huffman Karin M. Schmidlechner
Styrian women during and after National Socialism
Video
In her research and in the volume Aus dem Blickfeld (Out of Sight), co-edited with Heimo Halbrainer, Karin Maria Schmidlechner demonstrates that the lived realities of Styrian women during the Nazi era and the postwar period were diverse and ambivalent. Hence, she broadens the scholarly discourse on their daily lives while simultaneously deconstructing common narratives such as that of the conformist woman or the so-called “rubble woman.”
Karin M. Schmidlechner Eva Ursprung
The Art of Surfacing
Slide show
With the exhibition The Art of Surfacing, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the multifaceted work of Austrian artist, musician, and curator Eva Ursprung, who was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Province of Styria in 2024. Her cross-media, feminist, and socially critical approaches revolve around the element of water as a metaphor for change and political and ecological processes.
Slide show Eva Ursprung Susanne Wenger
Àdùnní Olórìṣà
Slide show
Susanne Wenger gilt als eine zentrale Künstlerin Österreichs nach 1945 und als frühe Wegbereiterin des Surrealismus. Ihr Œuvre, das Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Drucke und Batiken umfasst, überschreitet ästhetische Kategorien und verbindet Kunst, Spiritualität und Mythos.
Slide Show Susanne Wenger Tobias Boos
Chainsaws, crypto, corruption.
Argentina between populism and the radical right
Video
Tobias Boos is political scientist at the University of Vienna who specializes in Latin America, populism, and economic developments, such as Argentina’s crisis since the 2000s and current right-wing populist movements like that led by Javier Milei.
Tobias Boos Exhibition Tour
Diego Bianchi: Errores Irreales
Video
Diego Bianchi’s immersive sculptural installations reinterpret the concepts of sculpture and of the torso, taking seriously the sensitivity and distress of the human body as subjected to manifold pressures, and expanding and updating its forms of expression.
Exhibition Tour Diego Bianchi Exhibition Tour
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda
Video
A metabolic force governs the growth of Celina Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity.
Ausstellungsrundgang Celina Eceiza Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake
Slide show
For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan.
Slide Show Annemarie Arzberger