Alejandro Cesarco: Present Memory

About

Uruguayan artist Alejandro Cesarco pays special attention to the construction of narratives and the practices of reading and translating. 'I am interested in cataloguing, classifying, appropriating and reinterpreting texts', he has said. Through different conceptual strategies and a range of media, including prints, books, videos and installations, he explores the various meanings of words and images in relation to context, experience and subjectivity. Present Memory, a newly commissioned video, features an intimate portrait of the artist's father, a doctor recently diagnosed with cancer. Using a 16mm camera, Cesarco filmed him in his medical practice in Montevideo with a series of close-ups and medium shots. He later projected this footage onto the same room and recorded the film screening with a video camera. The resulting video is now being shown at three different sites across the museum. Conceived as a projection of a projection, its repetition creates a visual echo and activates a sense of déjà Â  vu every time the viewer re-encounters it. The work documents both a constructed and anticipated memory of the father, through which the artist also explores the writing of his personal narrative amidst the museum's writing of its own history and memory.