"Aftermath is an annual project created by students in the MFA course at Nottingham Trent University in response to Nottingham Contemporary's winter exhibition. The students respond to issues and concerns raised by the exhibition From Ear To Ear To Eye, that explored the politics of sound, music and listening, to create new work transforming their own practices into indirect forms of documentation, discussion and critique."
The creation of my work for the Aftermath project is under progress right now, as the attached video shows.
My work addresses painting as a means of translation, portraying the messages of the unexplored world of the oneiric #unconscious.
Dreams can help us to gain better insight into problems, offer new and creative solutions, and lead to a new way of thinking. Not only because our brain can work freely during sleeping when there are no disturbances from daily life, but because it has access to both the personal and the collective unconscious. This inner world of ours, where a higher intelligence resides, can be a source of imaginative wisdom and understanding. Looking for the latent content of #dreams, interpreting the messages of this symbolic language gives us the opportunity to find the meaning of life, to fulfil our true destiny, to make full use of our potential.
Dreams make the unconscious accessible; showing us what we do not know, what we do not notice.
In the state of #lucid dreaming, I use the capability of the unconscious to create snapshots related to a given topic or problem, and then consciously pick up on them. Interpreting these oneiric images alongside my dreams, with the help of a #Jungian analyst, makes it possible to choose the ones that I feel are worth investigating and portraying either on their own or as a collection. I paint mainly with acrylics, incorporating text elements in different languages into my paintings as metaphors for the unconscious and as symbols of multiculturality and constant change which are important factors in my own life. The same way as these texts cannot be fully read or understood, the information from our unconscious cannot be completely retrieved.
For the Aftermath Project, I have taken Joe Namy's work “Purple, Bodies in Translation – Part II of A Yellow Memory from a Yellow Age” as a starting point. His installation is based on two texts that discuss the act of translating war and resilience. It is designed as an immersive experience, “to create a reflective space for the audience to think through the intricacies of the wars in Syria and Iraq, mediated through testimony”. This is described as an internalized process with all the intricacy and complexity of translating someone else’s testimony into our own personal schema, with details lost in the conversion process.
The interface between his work and creating my final #dreamscapes consists of the process of translation and the difficulty of transferring information through the boundaries of language, culture and personal experience. This very much relates to the way I see the act of portraying dreams as smuggling information from the unconscious - an incommunicable inner world - to the real life; going beyond the manifest content through interpreting its language written in symbols and metaphors.
video: "Eye Tower" by Szilvia Ponyiczki
