Bracha L. Ettinger: Bracha. The Room Is Shared

The exhibition will transform the room in which Sigmund Freud partially wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams” between 1895 and 1899 into a dreamlike space of painting.

Seven paintings, created between 2006 and 2025, are embedded within the lived Venetian atmosphere of the historic hotel room. The exhibition unfolds over seven days – mirroring the number of works on display – establishing a quiet correspondence between duration and image, time and attention. Veils of mauve, deep crimson-purple, and milky white allow ghostly faces and trembling forms to emerge and dissolve before the viewer’s gaze. A series of previously unseen video works accompanies the paintings, extending the artist’s layered visual language into moving images, where cinematic time becomes an additional membrane through which memory and resonance unfold.

The exhibition also includes an installation of shells and milk thistle. The experience becomes one of proximity, echoing the intimacy of a psychoanalytic space while offering a contemporary feminist re-reading of subjectivity.

The Hotel Metropole itself, with its layered history – from a girls’ orphanage in the 14th century to a music school, a hotel from the late 19th century, and a military hospital during the Second World War – acts as a matrixial host for the exhibition.