Viktor Sundman

About the artwork

“untitled” (trauerspiel), 2024 

Memory, the staging of the past turns the flow of events into tableaux.
—Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn

the terror of uncertain signs
—Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”

“untitled” (trauerspiel) is an installation consisting of readymades, reproductions and textual elements. It delves into the abstraction of signs and the emergence of the modern subject within the context of queer genealogies, particularly in relation to bildungsroman and psychoanalysis. In this way the work traces the origins of neurosis, the shadows of desire that follow it through the objects, creating a detached interior, a domestic theater—a drama produced by the components of the installation.

As the parts counter the emptiness of Freudian tropes—theater, closet and other products stripped of meaning—a new image emerges, a scene from a bildungsroman where nothing really happens. “untitled” (trauerspiel) is an afterstage, where disassembled and dislocated objects produce their own dramaturgy where form and content mirror each other, creating their own circling logic.