Between Image and Remembrance: The Psychic Residences of Body Missing
Prefix Photo, Spring 2009, no. 19, pp. 42-55
This article discusses Canadian artist Vera Frenkel's installation of her photo-video-web-based work called Body Missing, in the Freud Museum in London, England. Body Missing is composed of a six-part video played on discrete monitors, large montage photographs, and phototransparencies. This illuminated images and the photographic montages are derived from stills captured from the video. This vast collection of artworks were stolen by Hitler and stored in salt mines. Frenkel then incorporated this into her investigation of Nazi art theft references and produced a website which was also part of the exhibition. In the Freud museum, the psychic residue of war conjured by Body Missing had found a place of belonging, in which stories of lost artworks and lost homelands resonated with repetitions and repressed memories that lie at the heart of psychoanalysis.
ITEM 2009.082 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
Body Missing – Vera Frenkel