Scrapbooking. Alexandra Murphy Das unheimliche Haus, Installation, 2006

Murphy, Alexandra (2025) Scrapbooking. Alexandra Murphy Das unheimliche Haus, Installation, 2006. [Show/Exhibition]

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

This project explores the Freudian uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) and his early notions of repetition-compulsion, namely, that something which was repressed will eventually return. In his essay, The Uncanny, psychologist Sigmund Freud, considers various expressions of this uncanny experience in the familiar domestic space. He was interested in the slippage or shift between something which might usually be experienced as heimlich or homely would then, without any rationality, be experienced as unhomely or unheimlich. The emergence of another idea also emerged in this essay which later formed his death-drive theory and this was our compulsion to repeat or the ‘unintentional return’. Freud proposed we do this through the process of sublimation, repressing undesirable behaviours or trauma to lead homely, socially acceptable lives, for a time. Through photographic stills, moving image and audio, the unheimlich is explored here through the remnants of a domestic space. By layering expressions of unheimlich repression with metaphorical and psychological representations of the pig-man allegory in George Orwell’s, Animal Farm, this project expresses the uncanny notion of otherness. We might experience something long ago, which we no longer remember due to repression, but which has now been compelled to return. This eerie, intense and unfamiliar manifestation of our uncanny experiences and memories, Freud describes as the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’.

Item Type:	Show/Exhibition
Depositing User:	Research and Knowledge Exchange Office Admin 1
Date Deposited:	30 Apr 2026 10:27
Last Modified:	30 Apr 2026 10:28
URI:	https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/20955

Actions (login required)

Edit Item