MONUMENTS TO THE UNKNOWN | 2023

MONUMENTS TO THE UNKNOWN | 2023

INSTALLATION, MIXED MEDIA

wood, digital print on sketch-paper, cardboard, archive images, aluminum and y-tong scale model

IN MEMORY OF MEMORY

In Memory of Memory examines the interplay of ancestry, memory, and performance as historiography. It brings together five artists working with photography, sculpture, installation, and performance, as well as prints and ephemera, gathered during the artists’ visits to neighboring antique stores and flea markets, which formed the starting point for the artists’ research during their short-term residency at W.

The exhibition borrows its title from the fictional memoir/travelogue by Maria Stepanova, which explores the complex histories embedded within souvenirs, letters, and family photographs. The narrator attends to the materiality of these objects as an attempt to overcome intergenerational silences and historical wounds. In the exhibition, ephemera and photographs act as prompts for the artists, several of whom translate this visual imagery into their artworks or respond to their cues in the form of improvisational scores. In Memory of Memory unfolds both within and beyond the boundaries of the city, conveying past and present memories of the urban environment.

Throughout the duration of the residency, the exhibition space functioned as both a studio and a collective gathering space for daily activities, writing sessions, and rehearsals. The artworks on display were produced on-site, forming an assembly of lived traces in direct dialogue with each other.

Atelier W

Nov 10, 2023–Nov 18, 2023
6 Avenue Weber 93500, Pantin