Friday, September 29, 5.30pm Galerie Rabus

Tanja Zimmermann
Rituals of (un)veiling: Orientalism and the Balkans

In the exhibition In Search of Balkania (Graz 2002), Irwin, a Slovenian group of artists, presented a photograph of Slavoj Zizek, lying like Freud’s patients in Vienna on a baldachin couch, which however is wrapped in Bosnian “oriental” carpets. On the inside wall hangs a copy of Courbet’s painting L’origine du monde, owned by Lacan.

The carpets and the unveiled female torso allude to Freud’s text “Forgetting of Proper Nouns”, in which he analyses his own case of not remembering – when he was travelling through Bosnia and Herzegovina – the name of the famous Italian painter Luca Signorelli, known for his depictions of torture and sexual orgy in his fresco of the Last Judgement.
The paper focuses on what remains displaced even in Freud’s analysis of himself, especially the ethnographic background of his own relationship to the Balkans. The analysis will try to bridge two poles: Western European travel journals about Bosnia and Herzegovina from the nineteenth century – and Zizek’s diagnosis of the Balkans as the zone of the unbound. In these texts, the female body, veiled and unveiled, is the centre of Balkan discourses.


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