For Broomberg & Chanarin’s latest show, which opened yesterday (7 October) at the Freud Museum, the artists hired a police forensics team to, ahem, analyse Sigmund Freud’s famous couch.
But, explains Adam Broomberg, the duo were “mortified” to learn that it had recently been restored—and hoovered. (The process has actually been documented and made into a video work, Analysis (2015), by the artist and friend of the duo, Jeremy Millar).
Fear not, CSI-lovers, there was a twist in the plot. The Persian Qashqa’i rug that covered the couch during its many years of service was the real bed of miniscule human remains. The forensics team sealed off the room and got to work documenting the found fibres but drawing the line after “a few hundred” samples.
“A nice metaphor” for thinking about the rug is as a photographic negative with “a hundred-year exposure”, Broomberg says. With the help of the forensics team, they have developed the rug findings to make 35mm slides and a new rug for the couch. The latter is a close-up image of a found fibre that may well have belonged to one of Freud’s famed patients—such as Dora or the Wolf Man—or simply one of the many daily visitors who got a little too close. Case unsolved.
• Broomberg & Chanarin: Every Piece of Dust on Freud’s Couch, Freud Museum London (until 22 November)