memoirs are the pixels of my life

About

How can an autobiography distinguish itself from a memoir? What is the essence of the moment we really want to capture when we feel the urge to document a thought or a feeling that comes and goes within seconds? Do we really want to treasure this moment or is it just a subconscious force that makes us want to preserve and sustain the past?

These are only but a few of the questions that the four participating artists of the group exhibition Memoirs are the pixels of my life investigate through their personal visual lexicon and the diversity of mediums each of them employs as a conduit of artistic expression.

A biography narrates the story of a life whereas the idea of a memoir that the concept of this exhibition mediates tells a story from a life. It is a snapshot of an instantaneous vision and a piece of incomplete and unpublished writing, whose author might revisit it in the future to assemble a more finished version or simply leave it as it is.

From ancient scribbles on stone, walls and pottery to contemporary memos accumulated on electronic devices, each one of us develops and demonstrates at some point the need to contain and compress a feeling or an idea in the form of writing. It is the prerequisite of esoteric expression, initially on a strictly personal and then, sometimes, on an inter-personal level.

Coded language echoes a significant aspect of documenting everyday life. Exercising an aesthetically curious and estranging mode of recording information can oftentimes lead to the abstract resource of undeciphered memoirs. Encrypted fragments of personal notations bewilder us with the illusive quality of memory and are destined to be turned –amongst others– into works of art allowing us to access a deeper realm of reality beyond the objective concealed interpretation of each symbol. Not being able to understand the bricolage of data that expand before our eyes, we turn towards its visual texture that consequently harnesses the power of hidden meaning.

Curator Kostas Prapoglou invites each of the four artists to turn into a memorialist and present their take on the transformative and reflective power of writing, orchestrating a noetic stratification of experiences and emotions. Every work on display comes to terms with our own past and finds its place within the contemporary world.