Collective Memory / Collective Amnesia (1989-93)
“Historical Interventions” show, List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA, 1991
Fontanelle, curated by Christoph Tannert, Berlin, Germany, 1994
Impressions Gallery, York, UK, 1995
Mixed media Installation | Variable
This work looked at the relation between forms of Cultural Memory and Cultural Amnesia as two parts of the same process. Collective Memory was first shown at the List Center of Art in 1991 and consisted of eleven aluminum boxes in which photographs had been screwed to their insides, a library ladder with which visitors to the gallery could slide along the wall to look inside the works and a framed legend which allowed another form of access to the work. The images used were from the Associated Press Archive and were from the following historical sources: 1. The Kennedy Assassination 2. The Challenger Explosion 3. Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Blast. These images were chosen because of their importance as well as their global impact and the attention they stimulated. They were mixed with personally made images of generalized emotive reactions,for instance, children crying. The aluminum boxes were called memory boxes. They were attached to the wall in a prescribed way and color coded according the event they portrayed. Some boxes were left empty or partly filled to imply that history is never really finished and a work of art is never completed. Cultural Amnesia was the second part of this work. Images I made at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam from its institutional display were again mixed with images both made and found. This work was meant to investigate the way that the popularization of an historical event had begun to jeopardize its historical significance. Anne Frank had begun to become a kind of pop figure and as such the real meaning of her life had become Disneyfied. The work was made up of again aluminum boxes with photographs bound to the inside. In this case all the boxes were painted blue and were in various stages of disrepair and fragmentation. For instance some had a side missing. Some were mere fragments installed on the floor. Some had bees wax covering them and finally some were burned. The installation itself was in the basement of the Siftung Starke, Berlin, one of the sites used for the exhibition Fontanelle curated by Christophe Tannert. The installation was made up of three parts. In the outer space I re-installed the Cultural Memory piece adding a number of library study carousels. A movable bookcase on a cantilevered swinging mechanism separated the inner and outer room. In the inner room was a furnished apartment complete with bedroom and kitchen. This was a simulation of a living space of a family in hiding. The bookcase could be opened and closed and represented a way to separate inner from outer, known from unknown, heimlich from unheimlich. As you moved from through the inner chamber the works themselves transitioned from formed memory boxes to unformed dissipated ones representing a kind of fragmentation of memory.