Professor Stephen Frosh and Canadian video artist Sydney Southam explore psychosocial themes, notions and connections between art, society and psychoanalytic thinking.

Stephen Frosh's new book Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions shows how the present is troubled by the past and by the future, using the idea of haunting to explore psychoanalytically how identities, beliefs, intimacies and hatreds are transmitted across generations and between people. It deals with the secrets that we inherit, the 'pull' of the past, and the way emotions, thoughts and impulses enter into us from others as a kind of immaterial yet real communication. Hauntings demonstrate how past oppressions return, demanding acknowledgement and reparation. Frosh explores how recognition and forgiveness can arise from this. Rooted in psychoanalysis, postcolonial and psychosocial studies, he addresses the question of what passes through and between human subjects and how these things structure social and psychopolitical life. 

Sydney Southam’s video work consists of archival film footage of her father who committed suicide when she was eight years old. In the last couple of years, videos such as Daddy (2010) and Ice Cream (2011) became succinct portrayals of her visceral reactions. The effects of intergenerational transmission become an apparent issue through her work together with questions of haunting, memory - and perhaps of silence. This event is part of Elegy(1) part of ... a public art exhibition at Yinka Shoniabare MBE's ... in May 2013.