VIENNA.- Animism is a multipart exhibition project; after episodes in Antwerp and Berne, it is now on display at the Generali Foundation. The exhibition Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass takes up the current broad-based reassessment of modernity, examining the ethnological conception of animism as it was framed in the context of colonialism as well as the concept of animism in psychoanalysis. In Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freud, one focus of the exhibition is on aesthetic approaches that subject the distinction between the psychological “inside” world and the material “outside” world to critical scrutiny. By the end of the nineteenth century, animism is defined as a set of superstitious beliefs, as a “projection” and misapprehension of reality in which the “primitive mind” populates the world with souls and spirits, endowing things and nature with life, agency, and subjecthood. At the height of European colonialism, animism becomes the quintessence of civilization’s opposite, the exemplary expression of a primitive “state of nature” in which psyche and nature appear as inextricably fused. In the context of colonial modernity this image of animism operated as a mirror, in which modernity affirms itself by showing what it is not. To be modern meant to leave animism behind and to separate the world in accordance with the dualist divides that have been in effect since Descartes: soul and body, mind and matter.