THE MATERIAL OF MEMORY. AFTERIMAGES OF RECOLLECTION

Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi, Dorothee Daphi, Ole Henrik Hagen, Carmen Dobre-Hametner,
Andrija Jovanovic, Naho Kawabe, Lumi Lausas, Matthias Meyer, Luka Papic, Clémence Roudil,
Diana Carolina Sánchez, Susanne Sander, Aron Sekelj

Curator: Belinda Grace Gardner

03.03. – 13.03.2016
Opening reception: 02.03.2016, 19 h

Open: Fr. – Sun., 16 – 18 h

Artist talk: 03.03.2016, 18 h
Carmen Dobre-Hametner (Bucharest/Munich) on the construction of memory and reality in her works.

The material of memory, from which we derive our concepts of reality, takes
shape on the border between the textures of the concrete and the virtual,
and between the time zones of yesterday and today. In the works of the
young French painter Clémence Roudil, the quest for tracing what
comprises ‘reality’, ‘history’, or also ‘the present’ takes place on the fringes of
the barely visible in imprints of walls and house facades. Balancing between
the worlds, the Hamburg-based Korean artist Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi captures
her everyday experiences in the flow of life in her diary drawings. Matthias
Meyer’s transformation of chronological narration into visual superimposition
alludes to the origin of film in the medium of photography, and to the act of
recollection as a process of overwriting and condensation. While Dorothee
Daphi litererally materializes events that once resounded from audiotapes,
and the Japanese artist Naho Kawabe captures the ephemeral rays of a
sunny moment in fragile shadow drawings rendered in coal dust, Susanne
Sander records the shards of social change in her photographs. In the
abandoned interiors presented by the Finnish-French artist Lumi Lausas, the
reminiscences of private (hi)stories subtly manifest themselves, to which the
multilayered photo-paintings of Ole Henrik Hagen depicting corroded objects
also make reference. The filmic photo series Consuming History created
by the Romanian artist Carmen Dobre-Hametner (participant of the Venice
Biennale 2015) reveals the rewriting and consummation of history
in re-enactments that oscillate between collective afterimages and individual
mirages. On their respective search for lost time, the protagonists of the
short films produced by Andrija Jovanovic and Luka Papic (both from
Belgrade), and Bogotá-born Diana Carolina Sánchez, in turn, embark on
journeys into the nocturnal spheres of dreams and nightmares. And in the
nearly abstract moving images of Belgrade artist Aron Sekelj, the landscape
itself tells of the war that has inscribed itself into its surfaces and arenas.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
The new production of Carmen Dobre-Hametner’s work Consuming History (2015)
was enabled by the Romanian Cultural Institute Berlin.
Special thanks to: Georg Hametner, Christian Knapp, Alois Knapp und AME design.

Photo: Carmen Dobre-Hametner, from: Consuming History, 2015.