AN EXHIBITION TO START 2024 WITH

Amaia Salazar (pictured, right) spoke to QUAD from her native Madrid, but is back in Oxford as 2024 dawns, where she is Academic Visitor, Ruskin School of Art, and Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College.

Her exhibition, entry to which is free, is at the North Wall Arts Centre in South Parade, Summertown, in Oxford. Unmasking the Mind runs from Jan 10 to 20.

The artist and researcher has a longstanding interest in sleep paralysis, which apparently affects far more of us than is commonly understood. This is a condition where you can’t move despite awakening, and is typically be attended by a stressful mindset; or occasionally it might be a more benign or even friendly impression.

Amaia said it hit her when on holiday age 12, and it was terrifying. ‘But meditation cured me of it.’

The exhibition involves some extraordinary exhibits including an array of test tubes in which the public can place their own notes, thereby becoming part of the exhibition themselves (left: Testimony Analysis, (2017)).

Meanwhile some of the photography is dreamlike, hallucinatory, maybe surreal, such as the elaborately contrived stairwell of the lead image for this feature (Lead image: Testimony D. (2017)).

Yes – Amaia says she is fond of Salvador Dali (1904-1989), the Spanish surrealist. We expected nothing less!

But the original inspiration here is more to be found, she says, with the 1781 painting by the Swiss Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare. In it a ghostly pale woman lies draped inert on a bed, sat upon by an incubus – a sexual demon.

The painting is fascinating in its own right, but Amaia’s interest is also partly that it appears to try and visualise an emotional state.

‘It is very difficult to represent a sensation because it is invisible.’

In her research, which overlaps her other role as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, she is attempting to produce a cognitive emotional atlas.

Amaia’s approach has always been highly interdisciplinary. She says her work is basically interested in art, cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology.

In fact her first engagement with Oxford was attending a short experimental psychology course five years ago in 2018.

The role of art is critical because we have all found ourselves reacting to a painting, or an artistic installation. Somehow it makes us feel something, even happiness, but rarely so simplistically.

But the question why, and to what to degree, well that is a hugely slippery subject.

During her time in Oxford, she has collaborated with Modern Art Oxford (MOA) giving the workshop “Conscious listening at the frontiers of the (in)visible”(2023), she has been awarded the first Wolfson Art Prize (2023) at Wolfson College, and organised several events bringing together Art and Science departments at Christ Church College and Wolfson College, respectively.

She says she had found it very stimulating to be in Oxford, and going from her college in North Oxford to the Ruskin School in Cowley means she can cross Oxford on a rather lovely walk.

Go and meet her, go and see the exhibition.