Orphaned Memories

About

Group exhibition presented as part of the official program of the 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival.

The group exhibition Orphaned Memories explores the interplay between object, place, memory, imagination and time in light of the “Future III” theme of the 2019 48h NK Festival. It is examined in the work of Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, (Canada/South Korea, installation), Dongyan Chen, (UK/Singapore, installation) and Elena Amabili, (Italy/Germany, photography), who regard it through the lens of psycho-geography, materiality, ideology and psychology. 

In the presented works, the historic, contemporary and futuristic often converge in surprising and enlightening ways. Next to cultural-historical processes, psychological standpoints on our own image and being may be subject to similar re-interpretations at various points in time.

Reframing cultural and personal memory is an ongoing process. Memory lies in archival material or obsolete media, open to salvaging or reinterpretation. Memory lives in the body and the mind too. Being reconstructed continuously, it is known to play uncanny tricks, as it often converges with fantasy. Surrealism, mysticism and psychoanalysis explore ways to retrieve lost impulses and reinterpret them.

Memory also lives on as material, in discarded media that can be reclaimed, brought to life and reinterpreted by artistic means by reframing still highly-charged psycho-geographic relics that speak of forgotten ideals and ideologies.

Orphaned Memories occupies itself with such memories, and fragments of utopian designs and expectancies for the future that have lost their origin but are still alive in one way or another. It shows highly imaginative ways of retrieving, questioning and responding to them.

Both past and future share an imaginative mental space in which self-experience becomes constituted by a mix of memory, imagination, and our expectancies of the future. Within this speculative space, how we view ourselves today may be dramatically changed by processes of introspection, reinterpretation and catharsis. Nothing is truly fixed. What we may have lost could still be found.