This event occurs in the past, the following is for information only

Seminars 4-6pm James Black Centre, Denmark Hill Campus, Private View of Exhibition 6-8pm, James Black Centre, Denmark Hill Campus

The Institute of Psychiatry is delighted to be working alongside colleagues from the Department of English, King’s College London to invite you to a seminar and private view of Shakespeare Dreams: Death & Desire.

The Leverhulme Trust generously funded a year’s artist-in-residence fellowship for Elpida Georgiou in the Department of English, King’s College London. The principal aim of her residency was the production of a series of twelve large-scale oil works based on key psychological moments in the plays of Shakespeare and offering challenging new perspectives on those moments. Elpida has sought in particular to represent the psychological models Shakespeare himself drew upon: finding negotiation between those models and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives has been a genuine challenge.

Shakespeare has always provided a rich source of thematic inspiration for artists. He has also had a highly significant place in the history of psychoanalysis: Freud was as dependent upon Shakespearean archetypes as he was on Classical, and Jung similarly drew upon the mythic power of the plays in his approach to the intersection of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It is to the conjunction of Shakespeare and psychoanalysis that Elpida is drawn as both the prompt and the thematic underpinning for a major series of works, combining ancient, early modern and post-Freudian models of human nature to confront key Shakespearean concerns: melancholy, depression, madness, narcissism, jealousy, child-parent relationships, the consequences of an absent parent, and the roots of violence.

The end result of the project is an exhibition of Elpida’s Shakespeare paintings at the James Black Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. The opening will be preceded by a seminar on the interconnections of Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and the history of art.

Please note that places are limited and will be distributed on a first come first served basis.

The exhibition will be on view at the James Black Centre, Cutcombe Road, Camberwell until the end of January 2009.

Seminar Programme | 25088 | .doc

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