Image and Memory
In late July of every year, galleries often include in their exhibition program a series of projects by emerging artists (many also finishing their BFA and MFA studies) working with photography, video or new media. These young artists often go beyond the technical aspects of their field of study and decide to problematize the image from a conceptual standpoint and to contextualize it relying on the viewer’s receptivity. Though it might seem that their projects do not look for common directions, they fit into a network of current interests around images.
Anca Țintea’s project, part of the IN Sequence exhibition which took place at the space of Rezidența BRD Scena9 (28.06 – 10.07), explored the process of forgetting through the medium of photography. In Index of Lost Matter, the artist challenged her father’s memory, which she surveyed through images in sincere matter. The research she undertook for around nine months started from a story shared by the artist with her father, verbally. The “first recollection” required him to recall the story initially shared, as the artist focused on small elements that were not preserved intact in his memory, capturing their altered pictures through photography. The project also had a second stage of recollection, suggesting that even though the research itself has an end, objects are in a perpetual state of change when subjected to the process of forgetting.
The photographs, which were taken on black-and-white film, almost exclusively with a flash, displaying pronounced graininess, were reproduced in a book-object that denotes a falsely progressive form of remembrance. The first stage of research introduced elements present in the initial story, and throughout the book these were re-photographed and re-included if they were remembered correctly, or appeared in the form of different objects if they were misremembered or absent. The image of a tree was introduced at the start of each stage, to mark a new stage of recollection, suggesting that the story is about to be rewritten. The last shot in the book reproduces the graininess of some of the project’s photos, pointing to the absence of certain fragments in the book, as the trace left by absence is evoked through an abstract form.
The research was exhibited as an installation, in order to emphasize the idea that recollection is a non-linear process, extending beyond the finality proposed by the artist. The trace-images that lay outside the book did not suggest a rigorous composition methodology, instead occupying the space along multiple axes. Therefore, the installation captured a visual representation of memory and its fundamental processes, supported by an organic research project that, in the end, opens up multiple possible finalities.
The verdrive exhibition accompanied Dan Chiș’s dissertation research and could be viewed at 8PT Alternative Space (03.07 – 11.07). If the stakes of Anca Țintea’s project were to associate matter and memory through the medium employed, the source of the images that Dan used for his project altered them consciously and conceptually. Additionally, in composing a radial installation from images using the entire space of the gallery, the artist overlaid a series of video projections and a sound piece in such manner as to interact with the viewer.
The concept of his work starts from a specific type of image that circulates in the post-internet age and which, through its medium of dissemination, turns into a moving copy, as its resolution is far lower than what one finds in the media. He references Hito Steyerl’s essay that defines this visual trace as a poor image, a representation that has become lost and deteriorated through copying and redistribution. Such an image explores the uncertainty established by the digital medium without altering its substance, but losing its intellectual property through transcoding.
The installation represented a dialogue around the concept of poor image in the context of the paradigm shift in which masses of people employ this type of image as a political, social, and comedic language. Composed of corrupt images from personal archives, glitches, memes, and images produced by generative adversarial networks, the artist’s research took a critical stand towards the reality of late capitalism, which delivers content through different media (photography, video, sound, algorithm) by overloading the exhibition space. Addressed to a generic viewer capable of establishing quick connections starting from a minimum of visual information, the installation attempted to simulate the agility of the image’s distribution and the acceleration of its gradual drop in resolution.
Ștefan Simion and Alessandro Grigoriu, members of the independent and peripheral art research group wundrkam, exhibited the soft hypostition project (A5 Studio Space; 30.06 – 11.07) which expands on the conclusions of the prologue Our synthetic language was a baby crawling towards that death chamber. Both projects aimed to reflect on the primacy of form in its initial state, preceding any network of meanings. Their speculative project was addressed to an undefined viewer that could just as well be a human, a bot, or a trace.
The pretext of the research was the phenomenon of workers’ migration out of Romania, combined with the space of the Basarabi-Murfatlar . Without pretending to come up with a clear answer to W.J.T. Mitchell’s symptomatic essay “What Do Pictures Want?”, the autonomous image asserts itself according to its power to engender imprecise categories within an abstract body. The images, both formal and , altered each other, revealing the precariousness of photography. In the end, only the disarticulation of the medium itself could potentialize the image’s transcendental capacities. Equally, the exhibition space simulated an analysis laboratory meant to stimulate a relation with the viewer through the concrete and synesthetic dimension of the works and the exhibition ensemble.
Whether through an exploration of the image starting from concrete research around the processes of memory or by using archive images to access ways of relating the viewer to the space, the projects of the current graduates met a series of interests shared by contemporary theorists. In most cases, the conclusions of their artistic research remained open and were addressed to an active viewer with the potential to reflect on the image starting from their projects.
– by Alexandra Moț