In this Freud Museum exhibition, Toby Ziegler’s large 3D-modelled Perspex and aluminium human hands, sit among the objects and antiquities that the Freud family collected in their home. Ziegler is interested in how our bodies – and our minds – are increasingly augmented and altered by technology. A dual-screen video work depicts various other kinds of inorganic hands, such as a prosthetic arm, accompanied by bizarre associated images that a Google reverse image search has algorithmically generated.
A series of sculptural and digital interventions in Freud’s final home weaved into the fabric of the collection. Focussing on the hand as motif, these interventions acted as props in a mise-en-scene which, while looking forward to a mechanically and digitally enhanced future for the human body, nonetheless insisted on its material, analogue, fleshly reality.
In Freud’s study, Ziegler placed several iterations of the same form, derived from a fragment of the Colossus of Constantine, a giant hand with a pointing index finger.
Elsewhere, two sculptures fabricated in facetted riveted Perspex suggested other points of reference. Illuminated by a huge bay window, ‘Martyrdom in the Swinging Sixties’, is a five foot high sculpture of the Christogram, the hand of Christ spelling out his own name, its plinth the table on the landing where Freud often wrote. On Anna Freud’s bed rested a sculpture titled ‘Self-portrait as a Klein bottle’. The Klein bottle was a paradoxical geometric form, a one sided surface (like a mobius strip), with no clear boundary between interior and exterior.
Toby Ziegler: The Genesis Speech. The Freud Museum, London, till 26 November.
