Art News

Animism: Modernity through the Looking Glass at the Generali Foundation

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,