Ghost Hunting Tools

Installation, 2022, (tactical waistcoats, silk, polymer clay, fleabane, eye shadow, metal hooks, EMF device, metal chains); Schizo Baby Babble, Rosanna Graf and Paulina Nolte, audio piece, 16:44 min.

Psychoactive Ghost Hunting Attire (Sabina & Toni), 2022 is closely linked to the video work Cellar Door (2022), which draws inspiration from the pioneers of modern psychoanalysis, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. These tactical waistcoats are outfitted with an array of tools, mystical objects, and keys to doors that do not exist—the Ghost Hunting Tools (2022). In Graf’s work, ghosts linger in the present as repressed fragments of our collective unconscious. Spielrein and Wolff themselves became spectral figures, their contributions erased by the male-dominated canon of psychoanalysis. Their voices reemerge in the audio piece Schizo Baby Babble (created with Paulina Nolte, 2022), where they embark on a surreal, psychoanalytic expedition inside a patient’s mind.

Pursued by the patient’s ego, neuroses, and other peculiarities of the psyche, they traverse a realm of psychedelic ecstasy. The boundary between magic and reality blurs when the psychoanalyst’s couch manifests within the exhibition space. In High Weirdness (Solaris Space, Berlin, 2022), instead of a traditional analysis couch, the work Exercising Restraint (2020) invites viewers to pause and listen to the audio piece. This monstrous "couch," seemingly pulled from the depths of the patient’s subconscious, engulfs the listener in a warm, cocoon-like form—providing the ideal setting for a deep psychoanalytic journey.

Ghost Hunting Tools, installation, 2022; Exercising Restraint, velvet object, 2020; Schizo Baby Babble, audio piece, 2022; High Weirdness, Solaris, Berlin, 2022, documentation photos (photos: Rosanna Graf)

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Installation, 2022, (tactical waistcoats, silk, polymer clay, fleabane, eye shadow, metal hooks, EMF device, metal chains); Schizo Baby Babble, Rosanna Graf and Paulina Nolte, audio piece, 16:44 min.