Olaf Nicolai
Trauer und Melancholie, 2009/2012

Installation view: Olaf Nicolai. There is No Place Before Arrival, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, 2018
© Bildrecht, Vienna 2021 | Photo: Jorit Aust

Olaf Nicolai

Collection

Single-channel video installation on monitor (color, sound), headphones, brochures, flyers, CD sleeve
10 min 12 sec (video)
Overall dimensions variable

The text Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud was written in 1915 and focuses on two fundamental psychological mechanisms in dealing with painful losses. As part of Olaf Nicolai's project for the "Jerusalem Show 2009" the first translation of this text into Arabics was made available for free to take as a self-made publication at several places in Ramallah and the surrounding area. In addition, an audio version in the local dialect Amey’hem was broadcasted via a radio station AMWAJ Radio.

Olaf Nicolai's work was conceived against the background of the very marginal circulation of Freud’s writings in Arabic and the ongoing discussion about the relevance of psychoanalysis in the Arabic world, but equally implies questions regarding the function of translation in the context of a politics of language where the distinction between Literary Arabic and the local vernacular is virulent. Above all, however, the work aims at the question of the possibility of mutual points of reference which can be unclosed by spaces beyond antagonistic positions. –TBA21

Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle an der Saale) is a German conceptual artist.
Nicolai's conceptual approach and continuous use of diverse media and materials both question the way in which we view our everyday environment. He is constantly translating scientific theories into art, into aesthetic-artistic idioms, rendering them accessible through new contexts; he refers to American sociologist, Jeremy Rifkin, who wrote:
The production of art is the final step of capitalism, whose driving force has always been to coopt ever more human activities into economic processes.
— Jeremy Rifkin, Le Monde diplomatique, N. 7131, August 15, 2003

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