Memorabilia - Curated by Lina Vincent Sunish

#Memorabilia

We live in dense times, made up by innumerable layers of human activity. As we negotiate these transforming layers we hold onto traces of the past, both material and immaterial, claiming our place in history and establishing the lineage of our memories and those of our forefathers and mothers. It is a tenuous relationship we have with our pasts; constructed largely through personal and public documents in word and image, they are often used to substantiate each other. The photographic image stands out as something that binds the entire (civilised) world together and provides a visual record of things long gone. The idea of photographic authenticity has always been questionable, the technology being one that thrives on exclusion and remains subject to the photographers’ choices and biases. Yet photos wield immense power – images can construct, define, destroy or manipulate private and collective memory. They can change our perception of person or place, and modify our notion of historical events. Camera images have been described by scholars as ‘shocks’ administered to the flow of time, and objects that, however innocuous, render the death of a particular combination of things. The digital era has to a large extent replaced the human eye with practices and computer aided techniques that allow constant permutations of existing reality, thereby wresting exclusive power from the human author. But whether ancient or new, our perceptions of photography are very much based on what we bring to the table: our personal, cultural, political biases, and the different links we read into the past and its bearing on the present. The volatile nature of our contemporary induces us to look back often, sustaining a link between different temporal zones. The fragility of memory, and the paper that sustains its physical form, become metaphors for the unsurety of our times. The artists in the exhibition in different ways enter into, and investigate memory - their own, and/or others’, using photographs, images derived from them, or the photographic process itself as raw material or references. There is a veritable ‘bioscope’ of memory within this exhibition, taking us into personal histories, collective memories, public archives, places remembered, and known and unknown cultures. These are looked at objectively by some, and with varying degrees of nostalgia by others .Notions of identity, belonging and displacement, comfort and alienation, become common threads that run through the works, allowing open understanding to anyone who may view them. Artists are chroniclers not only of their times, but commentators on times past, and foretellers of times yet to come. Here they create another type of history as they sometimes appropriate and dissect the integral properties of the camera image to extend their practices. Lina Vincent Sunish