Behind the Reality Principle is a third and last of the Drafts to the Collection of art of the 20th and 21st centuries. This series is a preview of the permanent exhibition, which will be available to the public in the spaces of ms2 in October of this year. “Drafts” present collections of the Museum in reference to the three key issues for the art history of the 20th and 21st centuries: relation of art works with the public sphere, a form as an active element of creating meaning and the art role in working through psychic experiences. In the spring of the last year we presented Draft 1: Art and Politics, which aim was to bring closer a complex relation network between artistic and political spheres. In the autumn of the last year, Draft 2: Power of Formalism once again asked a question of formal thinking in the 20th century art and of meaning of its contemporary aspects. Draft 3 is an attempt to present Collection in the psychoanalytical perspective.
While creating psychoanalytical presentation, we refer first of all to Sigmund Freud’s thought as well as to some concepts of his distinguished and independent continuators: Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott and Jacque Lacan. The title itself of the Draft 3, being a paraphrase of the title of as famous as ambiguous Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates a place, in which an art as especially weighty creation of fantasy is located.

Beyond the Reality Principle is an attempt to create what after Lancan we can call “a psychoanalytical experience.” The exhibition confronts audience with this kind of the experience in two ways. In one part, there are presented works undertaking issues, which at the same time are more important problems discussed through psychoanalysis, inter alia gender difference, love and desire, Oedipus complex or narcissism. In turn in the second part, works are being submitted to the discovered by Freud mechanisms of creation of night dreams, so that functioning of the unconscious processes, being an essential part of the psychic activity, could reveal.

In any part of the exhibition works are not used for a simple illustration of the psychoanalysis discourse. Beyond the Reality Principle opens space for a dialogue between those two spheres. In this dialogue the art reveals its own mechanisms of working through individual and group experiences.

Curator: Jarosław Lubiak