In this her text ‘Working Through Objects’ from 1994 Susan Hiller reflects on working with archival objects From the Freud Museum.
Working in the Freud Museum has been one of the most interesting things I’ve been involved in for a long time. Most spaces that one is allowed to inhabit temporarily as an artist are either ‘neutral’ spaces designated for art and thus marginalized in some way, or – particularly in Europe – derelict spaces: dead factories or abandoned warehouses. The Freud Museum, of course, is quite different. This is a space which was a family home and has become a museum – or a shrine, depending on how you look at it – and which itself houses the collection of the original inhabitant. So it has layers and layers of meaning in the present, as well as a very significant past.
