“These ‘eyes’ speak to the necessity to pause, to reflect, to turn to oneself and look at the world guided by one’s own feeling” – and this is why these “windows to the soul” are at the center of the installation EYES | OCHI, which was created in a small village near the city of Lviv in 2016.

There, in a space called “Prostir RaDity” (“Room of Children’s Joy”), numerous children find board and shelter during the weeks of summer, which gives them a chance to face up to the traumatic ramifications of the war in Ukraine. Founded in 2015, following the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbas, it has become a fixture and a point of reflection. “Prostir RaDity” is supervised by psychotherapists, artists, musicians, philosophers and other to address the external and internal injuries and dangers of war.

In the photo installation EYES | OCHI in the Showroom Berggasse 19, we are confronted with a richly layered kaleidoscope of children’s gazes, and with their struggle for a better future. During World War II, Anna Freud, child analyst and youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, also addressed the question of coping strategies after the experience of war – of how much states of anxiety and particularly the loss of (psychological) parents affect children’s psyches. October 9, 2022, is the 40^th anniversary of her death, which is why the Sigmund Freud Museum dedicates the presentation of EYES | OCHI to her memory and to her important work Young children in war-time: a year’s work in a residential war nursery (first published in 1942).