ANDREAS H. BITESNICH'S: Mutti - a conceptional work

OPENING
Tue, 14 Octo­ber 2014, 19:00

EXHIBITION
15 – 25 Octo­ber 2014
MO-FR 11:00 – 19:00, SA 10:00 – 18:00

Mem­ory is a strange thing. We tend to think of our­selves as cam­eras, record­ing events which we can truth­fully and repeat­edly recall with­out dis­tor­tion. Yet each time we remem­ber an event, a per­son, those mem­o­ries become slowly and inevitably mod­i­fied. Just as the cells in our bod­ies repli­cate to sur­vive and grow, so our mem­o­ries adapt, look­ing close to the orig­i­nal here and there, but alter­ing enough to enable us to fit them com­fort­ably into the myths of our indi­vid­ual lives. Our real­ity is a repro­duc­tion of a copy.

If our own lives are already prone to this dis­tor­tion, what remains of the dead? How much does our faith in the verac­ity of media inter­fere and reflect in this process? Pho­tographs can assist in recall­ing, and even entirely replace, an actual mem­ory, but like our mem­o­ries they are also prone to the attri­tional effects of time.

In reeval­u­at­ing and repho­tograph­ing these images of my mother (orig­i­nally taken by friends or other fam­ily mem­bers, as well as by myself), the process is empha­sized and accel­er­ated. This process, which is slow and often quite unin­ten­tional, allows us to cre­ate our own his­tory, and yet with each repli­ca­tion of mem­ory the real­ity behind it fades grad­u­ally away. Just like life itself.

(Andreas H. Bitesnich)

www.bitesnich.com