Gideon Rubin’s family fled the Nazis 80 years ago, just like Sigmund Freud, in whose Hampstead home the artist has secreted a series of new artworks. Most of this show is based on pre-war German magazine images, from which the taint of Nazism has been erased. Swastikas have been removed from the vests of exercising girls, parades have been doctored out of streets, colourful flags have replaced red ones we’d rather forget, but never can, or should. These images are put on the walls of Freud’s house, in the glass-fronted cabinets of its permanent exhibitions, and among Freud’s possessions in his study. In their vintage gilt frames, Rubin’s works look like they’ve always belonged there.
This exhibition is small, but it packs a punch. By hiding doctored artefacts in historical surroundings, what look like rooms from the past actually contain an alternative narrative where Nazis didn’t parade and didn’t murder millions. You have to dig out and separate the fiction from the reality, just as Freud would ask people to do with their own psyches.
But the real urgency comes with the ‘Black Book’ of the exhibition title itself: a first edition 1939 English version of ‘Mein Kampf’. Every page has been redacted, erasing Hitler’s words. It is an inversion of history in which the oppressors cease to exist in the way the oppressed actually did.