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Sofia Silva

Info: As an artist – and, one gets the sense, as a human – Sofia Silva works analytically. This is, however, about as much as we will learn about her, in spite of the fact that she works, in her own words, autobiographically, and that her exhibition at Braunsfelder is an exhibition entirely composed of self-portraits. The daughter of psychoanalysts, Silva is well aware that the self is a fiction. In his biography of Freud, Adam Phillips writes that, from Freud’s point of view, biographies were no more and no less than part of the dream-day of the reader – the source material for the much more convoluted, fragmentary truths due to arise from the unconscious during sleep. He described biography’s tendency to narrative and novelettish scene-setting as hysterical: like hysterical symptoms these scenes are always theatrical in their desire to move the reader, in their desire, like the hysteric, to be somehow vivid and memorable.
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