DOCTOR AND PATIENT: Memory and Memory Loss

MEDIA RELEASE

Doctor and Patient: Memory and Memory Loss
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger & Sergei Bugaev Afrika
At the Pori Art Museum, September 17 – October 27, 1996

The exhibition presents works by two artists: Israeli-French-Western European Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger and Soviet-Russian-Eastern European Sergei Bugaev Afrika, both of whom have been actively involved in the international visual arts scene since the early 1980s. At the same time, they have each played the role of doctor and patient: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger was born in Tel Aviv. She graduated from the Clinical Psychology Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and worked as a psychologist in Jerusalem and London during the 1970s and 1980s. She then began practicing psychoanalysis in Paris, a role she continues to hold today. Sergei Bugaev Afrika was born in Novorossiysk, Soviet Union. At the age of fourteen, he moved to Leningrad, where he became an artist. Diagnosed with “psychopathy,” he was first admitted as a patient to a psychiatric hospital in Leningrad in the mid-1980s for political reasons. In February 1993, diagnosed with “reactive psychosis,” he voluntarily sought treatment at the regional psychiatric hospital in Simferopol, Crimea.

Both Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger and Sergei Bugaev Afrika have directly incorporated their experiences in the roles of doctor and patient into their art: many of Lichtenberg Ettinger’s images are directly borrowed from psychiatric textbooks, and one of her key themes is autism. For Sergei Bugaev Afrika, obsessive representation and the syndrome of aphasia were important themes in the 1990s. The convergence of visual arts and the humanities is closely related to research into the psychology of creativity and psychopathology. The artist in question exists somewhere between the genius and the madman, the “normal” and the neurotic, the neurotic and the psychotic. On the other hand, the artist also functions as a doctor; quoting Gilles Deleuze, “artists” are doctors, not of their own illness, but of the entire civilization. The boundaries of creativity are constantly shifting, and the concept of these boundaries connects the normal with the pathological, art with non-art. This marginality is a central theme of creativity.

For Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, this theme appears as an attempt to delineate a matrixial boundary zone, appearing at the intersection of Self and Other, the visible and the invisible, word and image. The wiping away of the image, the erasure from memory – and simultaneously the reconstruction from the fragments of family and human history – are key subjects in Lichtenberg Ettinger’s works. Sergei Bugaev Afrika addresses this theme by utilizing the existing collective visual world, “collective creativity,” without distinguishing between the unique and the mass-produced. The reduction of an image to a barely distinguishable figure in his non-representational visual riddles became his means of combating the symptoms of obsessive representation. The relationship between doctor and patient, as well as between artist and viewer, is similar: their task is the “healing” of the viewer and the patient. Both art and psychotherapy require communication. The interests of the doctor and the patient, the artist and the viewer, align in affective states. The pathological and the aesthetic become spaces for communication. In one way or another, the affective state takes on an outward form: a symptom, like a work of art, is a message to the Other.

In the exhibition, the theme of “Memory and Forgetting” questions the relationship between doctor and patient: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is a patient of memory; Sergei Bugaev Afrika is the doctor of forgetfulness. The figures of doctor and patient, viewer and artist, dissolve and are represented in a world where the doctor becomes the patient and the patient becomes the doctor, the artist becomes the viewer and the viewer becomes the artist, in a world where “every contradiction must be fought away within the sphere of transference” (Freud).

Translated with ChatGPT

Publication:

ISBN 951-9355-55-3
Tohtori ja Potilas – Muisti ja muistinmenetys / Doctor and Patient – Memory and Amnesia
Pori Art Museum 17.9.-27.10.1996
Editor: Marketta Seppälä
Translations by Richard Beardsworth, Thomas Cambell, Carolyn Ducker, Seppo Siuro, Kaisa Sivenius, Pia Sivenius, Matti Velhonoja
Photographs by Jacques Faujoir, Yoram Lehman, Viktor Mazin, Olessia Tourkina, Erkki Valli-Jaakola
Lay-out by Jari-Pekka Vanhala
© Authors
Painohäme Oy, Ylöjärvi 1997
Pori Art Museum Publications 37
Length: 182 p