Is the cause for Elvis's suspicious mind a drop in his oxytocin levels? If our tears were missing prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormones, and leucine enkephalina, would they still signify sadness? If Freud was still practicing today, would he be promoting pineal envy?���

In a late footnote to Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reminds us that "at the bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the condition of sleep. It is the dreamwork that creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature". In Suspicious Mind, artists and contributors to the International Neuropsychoanalysis Conference held in Hiddingh Hall from 22 - 25 August 2013, dreamt a quirky, quack-scientific environment into being, exploring the peculiar forms that emerge when exploring the space between mind and matter.���

Think: walls of free association, a Freudian couch in a theatre showing "Atomic Brain Invasion", 100 000 dots on a single piece of paper, pharma-psychological dance moves, anatomical sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, phrenological charts and pathological brain specimens...���

Multiple digital publications of associated materials from the Honours in Curatorship students created a virtual exhibition for viewers to explore. This interactive set of displays formed part of the show and were presented during the course of the exhibition run in August.

Wall of free association���Instructions: Write down a word you associate with the last word written on the wall. Write down a word you associate with the word you’ve just written down. Continue until you lose interest.

Nicolas Hlobo Chitha 2006 Wooden dumb valet, jacket, rubber inner tube, silicon, fabric, ribbon 116 x 140 x 114cm (variable) On loan from SANG

Pierre Fouché Psamma Arenaria 2007 Crochet lace, black perspex 55 x 43cm

Psamma Arenaria 2007 I aimed to refer to the scientific agenda of the origins of botanical illustration without having to resort to the iconography and techniques of the tradition, and also to allude to the art historical significance of plant symbolism. The microscopic cross section of a blade of marram grass served both purposes well: the source image is a result of scientific enquiry, while the form of the plant itself (curled up to protect itself from dehydration during windy and dry periods) allows easy reference to a variety of self preservation modes, fragility. The interesting paradox here is that marram grass is a xerophyte in the truest form: its long roots help keep coastal dunes from blowing away, and it thrives under the harshest of climatic conditions.

Nicolas Hlobo Chitha 2006 Wooden dumb valet, jacket, rubber inner tube, silicon, fabric, ribbon 116 x 140 x 114cm (variable) On loan from SANG

Chitha 2006 Chitha means chucking out water, but it’s also slang for ejaculating. It’s a humorous term mainly used by young men – ‘I came’, ndichithile. The piece combines feminine and masculine objects. The bottom part is a woman wearing a rubber dress, stitched with pink ribbon, and a white frill with pink bows. The rubber has very phallic valves, as if you have to blow her up. She is lifting up a man, who is suggested by a brown suit jacket draped over a wooden dumb valet. This suggests a time in South Africa when the government has set policies to try and encourage businesses to empower women. The woman is lifting the man, so she has this weight, but also the power that she can lift a man. She’s in charge of the situation. She’s lifting the man right up against the wall. The man is not taking this easily.

The shoulders belong to both of them – they’re bound together, like Siamese twins or someone with multiple personality disorder. She’s wearing a shawl made of black silicon, the colour of mourning. Black absorbs energy, so the woman is taking all the energy from the man and pushing him right up the wall. She’s going to fling him over and take his position.

The way the woman is carrying the man, in the form of the wooden dumb valet, also reminds me of traditional African women. There’s an old saying, ‘the black woman’s power is on her neck’. Especially Xhosa women, they’d go to the forest to gather wood and carry these large weights on their heads. If you live in the urban areas of Johannesburg, you’ll see the Shangaan women who sell peanuts. They light their braziers using coals, then carry these hot braziers on top of their heads when they go to set up their stalls. There’s a sense of defying danger. It’s the same with women in the Transkei who go and gather wood. The Shangaan women and the Xhosa women, the reason they take the risk of breaking their necks, or having hot coals burn them, is because they’re working hard to provide for their families. Most of them play a very strong role in the running of the household; some are breadwinners. This work is looking at the idea of women being empowered to take charge of everything. And perhaps there are women hidden within some men’s bodies.

Chitha can also refer to destroying something. If this woman is taking over the man’s role and chucking her husband over her shoulder, putting him behind her, she’s destroying existing conventions. That’s what men are concerned about, they feel scared that they might not have a place anymore. Men are being taken out of their comfort zones, which is the effect of sexual identity politics on our heterosexual society.

Pharma-psychological dance moves based on the molecular structure of serotonin

Sandile Zulu Old Bones, Old Genes - a population groups case 2010 Fire, water, air, earth, canvas 150 x 350cm On loan from SMAC gallery

Old Bones, Old Genes - a population groups case 2010 A “visual explorer” and “pyromancer”, Zulu translates his explorations onto canvas in the archetypal mediums of fire, water, air and earth. His use of fire in particular, as both “image and process”, encourages the viewer to think about the politics of this volatile element. Both the paradox of fire as a creative and destructive force, as well as Africa’s history with fire, underpins this exhibition. It is the same intriguing element of risk involved in the controlled burning of veld fires that is at play in his compelling works on canvas.

Zulu has a deep interest in biology, sociology, astronomy, philosophy, history and psychology. The word histopathology from the exhibition title, refers to the microscopic examination of tissue undertaken to study the manifestations of disease. Zulu acts as pathologist, so to speak, looking at the universality of our human biology as a metaphor for exploring what he understands to be a “diseased society”, where our lived human experience is far from the one of the universality which our cells, tissues, muscles would suggest it to be. Having been brought up in rural Ixopo, KwaZulu Natal, and having experienced forced fencing and continual encroachment on his own family farm, issues surrounding inequalities have always been central to his work. It is not only the ignorant who Zulu sees as responsible for our disease, but also those who are aware of the inflictions in society and turn a blind eye. Zulu says that it is the social issues that negate us from one another: “It is not about pointing fingers, it’s about how I raise my perceptions as far as society is concerned from a creative or visual point of view”.

Zulu’s large-scale fire scalded canvases look like specimens or blood samples compressed between contact plates and put under microscopic view. His flat fire forms are strangely fluid and weird wormings. The DNA spiral structure, Rorschach-like burns, and scorched colon-like spinal columns form unusually beautiful images. The recurrent burnt patterns in this body of work point at our human biology as equal. Zulu remarks: “We come from one source, one genome, we are not different. This is the very serious side kick that goes with that fantasy I create”.

(Excerpt from Sandile Zulu: ARTOMS: Histopathology, Regeneration and Other Cases, 27 Sept - 18 Nov 2012, SMAC Gallery Available: http://www.smacgallery.com/exhibition/sandile_zulu%3A_artoms%3A_histopathology,_regeneration_and_other_cases)

Installation view of Suspicious Mind  

Dineo Seshee Bopape Bird's Milk 2009 Single channel video Duration: 5min 44sec On loan from Michaels Stevenson

Bird's Milk 2009 Bopape is known for her playful, experimental video works and cluttered installations of found objects. These delve into the magic and mysteries of the metaphysical realm and disrupt our understanding of time and space. Her videos have the potential to leave one in a rhythmic trance as the mind is transported to distant illusionary worlds.

A painterly work, Bird's Milk began as a 'love letter', capturing everyday events in a relationship. When the affair ended, the footage was re-edited in a process of reconfiguring memory, allowing the descriptions of things to bleed into each other and dissolve into fields of colour.

Installation view of Suspicious Mind  

Kim Gurney The Mother of All Firewalls 2012 Reclaimed acoustic tiles, graphite, bitumen, shellac, rabbit skin glue, beeswax pellets, gold glitter, aluminium honeycomb panel 280 x 48 x 4.5cm

The Mother of All Firewalls 2012 Language is an interesting barometer of how the way we speak can shape our world. Words both spoken and unsaid potentially create echo chambers and silo effects. This in turn is linked to behavioral finance, or why people act differently from the way classical economists expect. This cues a broader crisis around language and imagination, according to Professor Achille Mbembe:

There us an amazing impoverishment of language in South African public life. And all of that happening while the reality, the everyday experience of people is so rich… If one wants to aspire, the first capacity is to voice and also to be listened to (Excerpt from address at a Wits University School of Arts Open Lecture Series, April 2012).

A burgeoning new lexicon emerged following the 'Eurogeddon' of 2012: Greece was not in default but merely ‘taking a haircut' while the rest of Europe built 'firewalls' and 'bigger bazookas' to protect against contagion. This fallout following the 2008 global financial crisis was notable too for spawning its own lingo, in particular a penchant for acronyms that signaled a shorthand for nefarious practices. Gurney's new series of artworks The Mother of all Firewalls (2012) is brewed in this alphabet soup; appropriating commonly repeated words running through Google Insight to plot their incidence in news reports between 2008 and 2012. These findings are visually transposed onto reclaimed acoustic tiled to skeptically 'silence' the result.

(Excerpt from Pointure catalogue, an exhibition curated by Ann-Marie Tully and Jennifer Kopping, 8-29 August 2012)

Penny Siopis Remnants of an exhibition in the house of Freud 2013

Remnants of an exhibition in the house of Freud 2013 Remnants… presents residues of my 2005 installation on shame at the Freud Museum, Freud’s London home after fleeing Nazi Vienna. The exhibition was part of the centenary celebrations of the publication of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

A pivotal figure for the show was a small terracotta figurine in Freud’s collection of antiquities, named Baubo. How Baubo found her way into his collection is a puzzle. Perhaps a gift associated with his obscure 1916 case study ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, in which ‘a Baubo’ is referenced?

Baubo personified ‘shame’ as an emotionally and semiotically complex sensation, her act of exposure - one hand lifting her skirt to reveal her genitals and the other hand pointing to the site of exposure – resting on a knife-edge between affirmation and negation. ‘Shame’ as JacquelineRose reflects ‘relies on the art of exposure, even if exposure is what it hates most, and most militantly struggles against’.

The installation was in three parts; my ‘method’ was free association.

In Freud’s study I played recordings of seven prominent South Africans speaking about shame. Their voices coloured the couch and evoked the talking cure.

In Freud’s dining room, I flung open his closets and put ‘other’ things on his shelves. Neither labeled nor categorized, these objects ‘floated’ symbolically like so many of the more arcane objects in his collection, and in my mind.

In the exhibition room/Freud’s bedroom, I placed his deathbed in the middle of the space and surrounded the object with a frieze of my small shame paintings. I had found the object in his attic.

Katherine Bull data capture_LOST & FOUND 2011- Performance installation Dimensions: variable  

data capture_LOST & FOUND 2011- data capture: LOST & FOUND (2011) consists of a pair of actions to be witnessed in a dialogue with one another. Starting with data capture_LOST I attempt to paint from the moving image on the television screen, creating a watercolor for each episode of the six seasons of LOST (ABC. 2004). Here I play at an ethnographic study or the role of the amateur naturalist in which a material archive (119 watercolours) is created from the time-based media viewed as a kind of ‘contemporary cultural landscape’ of pleasure and escape. LOST is followed by a second action, FOUND in which I explore the boundary of self-representation. Using the projected film clip of a psychological study of a female mental patient as a ‘medium’, I attempt to embody the shadowed image of the filmed patient as a means to explore the boundary between the tangible and intangible. Moving from one action to the other I move from an obsessive attempt to capture my visual perceptions of the ever-changing television screen to an internal space of feeling and its affect as bodily gesture.

Katherine Bull data capture_DOUBLE TROUBLED 2013- Ambidextrous Skype portraits of the Neuropsychoanalysis conference delegates Oil on board 24 x 18 x 1.6cm (each)

Katherine Bull data capture_DOUBLE TROUBLED (2013), data capture_LOST& FOUND (2011 - ) Ambidextrous Skype portraits of the Neuropsychoanalysis conference delegates Oil on board 24 x 18 x 1.6cm (each)

data capture_DOUBLE TROUBLED 2013- Prior to the exhibition opening, international delegates from the NPSA (Neuropsychoanalysis) conference were invited to connect via Skype video chat for a one-hour portrait appointment. While they worked on their computer, I kept them company and painted them while I watched them concentrate. The double portrait sketches are generated using my left and right hand simultaneously to create the two parallel portraits. I am interested in how the online platform enables an intimate ‘live’ connection with another, yet there is a temporal-spatial distance. In using the Skype interface as a space of silent communion, I draw attention to how we communicate on other levels not just direct engagement through speech and gesture. I am interested in using the online video chat platform formally due to the ‘painterly’ quality of the varying digital resolution of the connection and the ‘doubling’ that occurs within this interface. By doubling I mean that you are able to watch the person you are connecting within a larger ‘window’ and yourself mirrored in a smaller ‘window’. Through creating an ambidextrous portrait I generate a further doubling and hope to explore the differences between my left/right brain perceptions.���

Maggie Zellner, Maribel Rodriguez Luna, Virginia Barry, Iftha Biran, Irith Raveh, Mark Solms, Justine Kupferman, Anna Krantz (left to right in rows)

Katherine Bull data capture_DOUBLE TROUBLED (2013-) Live performance with Jaak Pansepp in Michaelis Gallery���Ambidextrous Skype portraits of the Neuropsychoanalysis conference delegates Oil on board 24 x 18 x 1.6cm (each)

Nina Liebenberg���The Northern Lights���2013���Histology slides of the brain, scanned and converted into video���100 x 120cm

Fabian Saptouw 100,000 DPI 2013 Pen, Fabriano���100 000 dots on a single page 70 x 100cm

Gerhard Marx The Garden at Night (IV) 2012 Plant material on acrylic paint and glue ground on cotton paper 51 x 51 cm

The Garden at Night (IV) 2012 The Garden at Night is an ongoing series of drawings that uses plant material to construct images of the human head. These drawings are created with reference to a variety of scientific imagery of the interior anatomy of the human head (sections, scans, etc.). The ‘garden’ (as referred to in the title) is essentially a visual construction, much like the tradition of portraiture. The Garden at Night, denies this visual focus on the surface of the head (and the centrality of both face and skin), by literally constructing the images from within, using imagery of what is ‘known’, rather than what is ‘seen’.

Ruth Sacks Chimera (Mme Charcot) 2013 2 x Inkjet prints on paper 23 x 20,5cm

Chimera (Mme Charcot) 2013 This piece takes its starting point from an engraved coffer made by Mme Charcot, wife of the founder of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot. Exhibited on the first exhibition of women’s art in France (1892), Mme Charcot’s object d’art was seen to represent the accepted conception of women at the time. That is, its composition of an ornately decorated exterior, housing a dark interior populated by fantasical hybrid creatures, was read as an illustration of a rational façade with an irrational interior. Such ideas were encouraged by Charcot himself in his study of female hysteria. The neurologist placed great emphasis on visual representaton, using drawings and photography to study the particularities of his patients’ contorted bodies. Similarly, his theatrical clinical sessions, in which ‘celebrity hysterics’ like Blanche Wittman and Genvieve Legrand were observed by an audience of doctors, generated a great deal of sensational popular imagery, still in circulation today. With this setting in mind, Chimera (Mme Charcot) is a re-looking at an object produced by Charcot’s wife. On examination, the supposedly grotesque creatures on the inside of her coffer seem conventional and tame. There is a sense that her ability to make the irrational visions of her unconscious visible was constrained. In the piece seen here, the interior space of Mme Charcot’s coffer is presented as a façade, covering an image that may, potentially, have haunted her.

Willem Boshoff Political Candyfloss 2008 Etching 74.5 x 49.5cm (one print of the diptych) On loan from SMAC gallery

Political Candyfloss 2008 In 2001 I wrote a small dictionary of political terms. Some of these were highly entertaining and some proved quite useful in describing what I believed about some politicians all along. These dictionary entries have been useful in the making of artworks, like for example, CLOSED BALLOT (2004). In this work I used terms like: albocracy Government by ‘white’ men or Europeans; chirocracy Government by military force, or the ‘strong hand’; chromatocracy Government by a group of people of the same skin colour ruling over people of a different colour; argentocracy The rule of money; coprocracy Koster’s word for "the rule of shits" cormorancy Rule by a greedy and oppressive class; gerontocracy The rule or power of old men; hierocracy A government by the church; hoplarchy Government by armed soldiers; kakistocracy Government by the worst citizens; kleptocracy The rule of thieves; logocracy Government by fancy words; oligarchy Government by a small group of privileged persons; phallocracy The rule of men only; xenocracy The rule of foreigners.

In Political Candyfloss I again used my dictionary of political terms when I tried to write glimpses of political madness as if by the hand of a schizophrenic politician. A certain infantile, shivering quality in my handwriting was made easier because I had to write backwards in the hard ground on an etching plate. The printing of the plate in reverse made the text legible in places.

Pippa Skotnes Freud, Darwin, Fanon 2013 Singe channel videos of clocks installed in the new Psychology Department, PD Hahn Building, University of Cape Town

Freud, Darwin, Fanon���2013 In early May 2013 Breath, an artwork installation by Professor Pippa Skotnes was launched at the UCT Psychology Department in the PD Hahn Building, comprising three discrete works: a set of turning boxes visualising aspects of the history and practice of the discipline of psychology, a wall mural entitled Breath that takes as its starting point the conception of the mind as expressed by |Una Rooi, one of the last speakers of N|u, who died in 2012, and three clock-like disks dedicated to Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Frantz Fanon. For Suspicious Mind, these three clocks were filmed and displayed in digital photo frames.

Fritha Langerman Morton's Method (1839) 2013 Found materials 100 x 100 x 40cm

Morton's Method (1839)���2013 In 1839 the American physician and naturalist, Samuel George Morton, published his Crania Americana. In this he developed his theory based on comparative measurements in which he initially used mustard seed and ultimately lead shot to determine a racial hierarchical scale based on cranial capacity. In a determinism that equated brain size with intellect, he found that Caucasian skulls were the largest, followed by Asian, Native American and lastly African.

This artwork draws an analogy to the hierarchical understanding of speciation and racialised taxonomies. Three funnels are labeled with three subjects of psychological experiment - pigeon, rat and chimpanzee – and filled with their relative brain weight in seed.

Malcolm Payne Pox 2005 Pigment print on Hahnemeuhle 200 x 100cm

Pox 200���There is a final clue that the dream of the twin houses offers us in the quest for access to Malcolm Payne’s work: the clue offered by the dream itself and the imagery generated during sleep, autistic states and hallucination.���

Dream imagery is vivid, palpable, plausible in spite of its improbable scenarios and visual prodigies. The imagery of hallucination is even more vivid for it is layered and capable of engaging the agency of the body. Hallucinations and altered states of consciousness have been described as phased and incremental. They may embrace many kinds of visions but often include geometric percepts (or entoptics) which are generated somewhere between the eye and the cortex of the brain. These flicker, curve, create vortexes, zigzag, contract and expand into ever-changing spirals and shapes. Unlike dream imagery, they may be experienced with eyes wide open and combine, along with entoptics, a range of iconic imagery that floats and merges within and around the matrix of geometric percepts (12).���

The space of the hallucination, though often described as disturbing, even terrifying, is both the space of the reflection and a space of pure wonder. It is the space conjured in the prints of this exhibition. It is a space populated by images and objects that refer at once to a past system of symbolic order and a contemporary system of global disintegration. More than this, it is a space of visual pleasure, even as it hints at carnage and catastrophe. It represents, in Philip Fisher’s words, “a middle zone” between the familiar and uninteresting and the unknowable or unthinkable (equally uninteresting). It is a “middle zone in which the poetics of wonder occurs” (13).

Notes. 12. Lewis Williams (2002) in The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson) argues for these kinds of hallucinatory images at the origin of art. ���13. Philip Fisher. 1998. Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p180.

Extracts from: The invisible elsewhere: an introduction to Malcolm Payne’s "Illuminated Manuscripts” by Pippa Skotnes

Doreen Southwood Anorexia Nervosa 2001 Cabinet, vases 150 x 20 x 10cm

Paul Edmunds Fan 2006 Linocut 150 x 110cm

Specimens and models in cabinet on loan from the Pathology Learning Centre and the M.R. Drennan Anatomy museum, University of Cape Town, 'Hysteria' (2013), by Nina Liebenberg (portraits of Sigmund Freud’s patients using Bulotta Africana tea, once used as a treatment for hysteria) and X-rays of indigenous plants sourced from Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens (used in the treatment of insomnia, anxiety, hysteria, convulsions and epilepsy).

Nina Liebenberg���Planthology 2013���X-rays of indigenous plants sourced from Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens used in the treatment of insomnia, anxiety, hysteria, convulsions and epilepsy

Rare books and prints from UCT Rare Books Collection

Screening room equipped with Freudian couch

Screening Room

Frankenstein (1931) The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Johnny Mnemonic (1995) Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) Atomic Brain Invasion (2010) Awakenings (1990) Total Recall (1990) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968) The Brain (1962) Donovan's Brain (1953)

Suspicious Mind viewer participation elements

Suspicious Mind website: http://suspiciousmind.co.za/

Visit the website (http://suspiciousmind.co.za/) for additional information on the project, artists' biographies and student-related projects or, enjoy the Prezi (http://prezi.com/aneecacxdtph/suspicious-mind/) initially created as a showcase to present to potential participating artists.

For more information, contact Nina Liebenberg (curator) on 021 480 7151.