Getting inside mind of freud

It brings together seven innovative WA artists to reconsider Sigmund Freud and his work in relation to his domestic context.

Based in the London townhouse in which Freud and his family settled after fleeing the Nazi occupation of Austria, the Museum houses the late psychoanalyst's extensive collections of art, antiquities, textiles, prints and furniture, as well as his library, and an archive of correspondence.

Its centrepiece is Freud's study, maintained just as it was during his lifetime, and containing numerous objects that have become famous in their own right through their association to his work, including the iconic psychoanalytical couch.

The artists " Thea Constantino, Susan Flavell, Tarryn Gill, Travis Kelleher, Pilar Mata Dupont, Andrew Nicholls and Nalda Searles " were given permission to film and photograph in Freud's study and allowed to handle priceless objects from his vast collection of over more than 2000 antiquities, spanning 4000 years of human civilisation.

The residency also allowed privileged insight into Freud's final months, through the viewing of items from the collection that are not on public display due to their personal nature, including the couch on which he died in 1939, the mouth prostheses and cranial X-rays associated with his terminal cancer.

In reflecting these experiences, the resulting artworks bear a fitting relationship to psychoanalysis, a therapeutic discipline dependent upon an extended intimacy between an analyst and patient.

As such, An Internal Difficulty represents a unique and intimate reconsideration of one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.