The Freud Museum comes together with the University College London´s Gashaka Primate Project to present Apestraction - a solo exhibition of works by Mexican artist Damián Ortega.

Ortega is well known for his practice, that ranges from sculptures, installations, videos, photographs and actions inspired by a wide range of mundane objects, from golf balls and pick-axes to bricks, rubbish bins and even tortillas, all subjected to what has been described as Ortega’s characteristically “mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction”

The artist was invited to visit the Gashaka region in Nigeria: one of the last remaining wildernesses in West Africa, where the rarest subspecies of chimpanzees survives and where the Gashaka Primate Project has its base. By taking an artist to the wilderness, bridges and boundaries between Art and Science are instinctively created.

This exhibition explores these divisions and their transgressions through the work of Ortega. Unlike a dissecting and objectifying scientist, an artist will be able to contextualize the sensitivities of our natural and cultural side in a more nuanced, private and subjectified way – thus honoring Freud’s idea that our psyche is at the heart of our existence.