The Unconscious Unknown

"Psychoanalyse helped me to understand some of the roots to taking an inner life properly seriously. And saying it is after all the thing from which all the rest emerges. Even though the work does not give it biographical space in the same way perhaps other artists do, it's that curious balance of saying without it it's nothing, on the other hand it's not on display."

"There is this serious element of the unconscious operating in a lot of this. It seems to me that there’s no other reason to be an artist."

"If I know what I know and you know what you know and I tell you what I know, who cares?"

"My instinct is that making work is about, I’m daring to go to something I don’t know and hoping that in going where I don’t know, you the viewer can go where you don’t know too."

"The route to meaning may not be direct."

"Just as you can’t make something beautiful or set out to, you also can’t set out to make something spiritual. What you can do is recognise that it may be there. It normally has to do with not having too much to say. There seems to be space for the viewer and that’s something that we sometimes identify as being spiritual, and it’s all about space."

Quotes from BBC documentary Imagine on Anish Kapoor (2009)