To coincide with the close of Grundy’s current exhibition, Zoe Beloff’s ‘DREAMLAND: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and the Blackpool Chapter’, Grundy hosted ‘Freud In Blackpool’; a day-long symposium – the first of its kind to be staged by the gallery – exploring in greater depth both the exhibition and the history of Freud’s visits to Blackpool, together with an examination of broader themes and questions arising from this relationship between Freud and the fairground. A range of speakers discussed how this unlikely conjunction can be discerned in literature, film and visual arts.
The symposium also featured a special performance by ‘MOUTH’ (Edia Connole and Scott Wilson) as well as a reading from a new play ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ by Blackpool-based playwright David Riley.
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SPEAKERS:
ZOE BELOFF
Zoe Beloff is an artist and professor at Queens College CUNY. She works with a wide range of media including film, projection performance, installation and drawing. Each project aims to connect the present to past so that it might illuminate the future in new ways. Her projects have presented internationally at venues that include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Site Santa Fe, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her publications include The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle and The Somnambulists: A Compendium of Source Material.
MICHAEL EATON
Professor Michael Eaton, MBE, is a screenwriter who specialises in docudrama. His work includes ‘Shipman’, ‘Shoot To Kill’ and ‘Who Bombed Lockerbie?’ His fictional work includes ‘Flowers of the Forest’ and the TV series ‘Signs and Wonders’. He had adapted works by George Eliot and Charles Dickens for BBC Radio 4. His latest play, set in Nottingham’s Goose Fair, opened at the Nottingham Playhouse earlier in October.
VANESSA TOULMIN
Professor Vanessa Toulmin is Director of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield and Chair in Early Film and Popular Entertainment. Professor Toulmin is a leading authority on early film, Edwardian and Victorian entertainments and popular culture, the history of freak shows, carnivals and British fairgrounds and the culture and society of travelling showpeople. As creative director of ‘Showzam’ Professor Toulmin curated an annual festival of Circus Magic and New Variety in Blackpool. She is the author of several books, including The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, Electric Edwardians, and Pleasurelands. Her recent publications include four major works on the architecture and history of Blackpool’s attractions – Winter Gardens, Blackpool Tower, Blackpool Pleasure Beach and the Blackpool Illuminations.
SCOTT WILSON
Scott Wilson is Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University, London. His research interests include cultural and critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and the legacy of Georges Bataille. Recent books include: ‘The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment’ and ‘Great Satan’s rage: American negativity and rap / metal in the age of supercapitalism’. He is co-editor of the Journal for Cultural Research and co-editor of The Bataille Reader.
PERFORMERS:
MOUTH is an actionist art project in culinary divinomics formed in March 2012 by Edia Connole and Scott Wilson. Associates for Freud in Blackpool include Petra Jackson and Suzanne Walsh.Recent events include: Land: A Scarcity Banquet, Prosperity Project, Dublin (2013), The Other North Symposium with Jesse Jones, CCA Derry (2013), ‘Break Bread Open’, FACT, Liverpool Biennial (2012), www.mmmouth.wordpress.com
DAVID RILEY
David Riley is a writer, poet and historian based in Blackpool. His play ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ imagines the recollections of Freud thinking back to his visits to Blackpool, amongst other key moments in the psychoanalyst’s life.