Back to the Unconscious

2026 — Exhibition Program

July 17— November 19

Back to the Unconscious is the second exhibition series in our gallery Open Call program. It presents a collection of works that explore unconscious and emotional responses to an era marked by apparent irrationality, disempowerment, and escapism.

Empathy Gym, the first exhibition in the series, examines the process and capacity of connection, stretching concepts of how we may understand and know something outside the familiar. How do we truly connect to another? Not only to ‘mirror’ one another, but to see, outside of oneself, the other.

Un-redact Strangers’ Stories, curated by Yi Li, is a group exhibition addressing censored, silenced, and sensitive content. Un-redact examines how predicaments are purposefully overlooked by power structures and contemporary flows of ignorance.

In Fun House, home and shelter express the disorienting experience of the uncanny through the lens of migration and [post]modernism. It is a moment of psychic fracture, when what should be safe is dismantled and what is promised is distorted.

The program closes with Time Shelter, where artists confront technostalgia, memory restoration, and the urge to retreat from the onward march of time.

Why now?

Is there a better tool than the unconscious for diagnosing the irrationality of the current moment? The pace of catastrophe resists cool explanations based on structural incentives. Even outwardly irrational drives—greed, power, ideology—can feel inadequate as explanations.

As Amia Srinivasan recently wrote:

“We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty, racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.”

In times of crisis, when our deepest fears reassert themselves, we look to psychoanalysis to reflect ourselves—and our world.

The real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us not only from the violent divisions of our own psyches, but also from the violent divisions, and resulting despair, of our political moment.

Shivers Gallery is an independent not-for-profit gallery on Sydney Road, Brunswick. We support experimental art and emerging artists with diverse voices and perspectives.

This program is supported by Arts Merri-bek through the Flourish Arts Grant.