About this event

Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series with speaker, Prof Joseph Koerner.

In Art in a State of Siege, Joseph Koerner examines how art bears witness to moments of collective psychic rupture—when the social contract collapses and unconscious anxieties surge into the cultural field. From a psychoanalytic perspective, these artworks emerge as symbolic defences, sublimations, and communications in times of acute societal breakdown.

When the external world becomes unthinkable - under siege, under tyranny, or under erasure - artists perform a function akin to the analyst in crisis: they contain, give form to, and transmit unbearable truths. Koerner’s exploration of Bosch, Beckmann, and Kentridge reveals how, in such times, art refuses the lure of manic denial or dissociation. Instead, it often occupies what Wilfred Bion called a “container” function for the collective mind, metabolising unprocessed violence, persecution, and fear.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights can be seen as a dreamscape of paranoid-schizoid anxieties—where inner chaos mirrors outer threat. Max Beckmann’s self-portrait asserts the fragile ego in the face of rising authoritarianism, a desperate effort at self-integration before historical annihilation. William Kentridge’s animated erasures enact the trauma of apartheid not as a resolved image, but as an open wound—where memory is continuously undone and re-stitched, echoing the workings of the traumatised psyche.

These works do not simply reflect trauma—they resist its foreclosure. They function as countertransferences in visual form: signals from within the social unconscious, warning against repression, foreclosing, and moral collapse. In times when speech fails, art becomes the last line of psychic and political resistance.

Prof Joseph Leo Koerner, is a distinguished American art historian and filmmaker. He currently serves as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows.  Has a long interest in Psychoanalysis. 

Please note: This event will be recorded and available for 1 week to all registered participants.

Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

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