'Invitation to Frequent the Shadows' was a 2016 exhibition at the Freud Museum, London, which included fifty framed fragments of the same profile of a six-year old girl from a series titled 'The Sessions'; 'Safelight' a light installation created in Sigmund Freud's study; and 'Laments', an installation of light boxes on display in the dining room.
Made during a 2014 residency at the Freud Museum, London, ‘Make a note of anything’ is a permanent site-specific installation. Made in collaboration with pupils at Holy Trinity Primary School in Hampstead to realise the work, which was created specially for the Anna Freud Room at the Freud Museum. A frieze in 268 parts, Von Zwehl photographed over 100 children’s eyes, which were installed in the formation of a frieze that runs unbroken around the room, just below the ceiling. The eyes are punctuated by more abstracted images; sections of blurred green foliage; glimpses beyond the room and out into the garden. The elevated height of the frieze repositions the child into the role of the observer rather than the observed, and in this way, the intense, uncompromising gaze of the children metaphorically ‘bear witness’ to what passes below them.
"Immersed in shadow, faces turned away or concealed, the women seem intensely aware of soliciting the very gaze they evade ... Physiognomy, comportment, feelings are all revealed not through light but through darkness; shadows give us access to elements of the self that no light could reach. No doubt the flowing contours of the sculpted head, exposed neck and curved bust, caressed by a nocturnal light that seems to emanate imperceptibly from within, amplify the erotic charge of these pictures. But this charge feels to me to have more to do with the desire they arouse and even, impossibly, gratify – to see the other not in her presence but in her absence. You might have expected the darkness to drain the blood from these figures, to render them abstract, thin, insubstantial. Instead it endows them with a fleshly reality more palpable and more present than any flashgun or ceiling light could hope to achieve. These Laments are exposures, to be sure. They reveal the human as a lamenting being, destined to live with loss and absence ... Reminding us, in silent defiance of our culture’s tyrannising transparency, that the truest exposure keeps us hidden." - Josh Cohen, Extract from the Essay 'Invitation to Frequent the Shadows', included in 'Lament' (Art/Books, 2016)
