Acts of Memory – Deirdre M. Donoghue & Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir
The exhibition Acts of Memory (28.11-22.12.09) is a collaborative project between two Nordic born artists Deirdre M. Donoghue (FI / IRL) and Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir (IS).
The works in this exhibition explore the agency of memory production in relation to the construction of identity and the creation of autobiographical narratives. Referring to both imaginary and actual spaces and the passage of time, the exhibition investigates the production, consumption and affects of memory. Some of the works will be produced during the artist’s stay in Pori, for example a performance Performing Memory by Donoghue (on Saturday the 28th only) and a reading table with selected material from the Pori Art Museum’s collection of books and texts amongst others.
Deirdre M. Donoghue, (Finland, 1971) is an artist based in Rotterdam. In her works she seeks to set-up situations where multiple relations can be set into motion and the production of new knowledge through cross-disciplinary methods and approaches become mobilized. Her video, photography, installation, performance and text works often focus on the relational aspects of memory production, cultural translation and the production of a Self. For example in Rehearsing Memory, (20:23 mins.) a single screen video work divided into several acts and scenes each dealing with different aspects and types of memory, Donoghue brings together three sisters, now all in their seventies and living in various parts of Finland for a reading of some ‘official’ and personal documents and letters describing the events surrounding the death of their father during ‘The Second World War’, as well as to share personal and collective recollections from this specific, historically important time period in their childhood. By questioning the authority of memory given in the construction of historiographical narratives and historical singularities, that such narratives produce, Rehearsing Memory places the production of memory in the present moment where it becomes actualized and mediated again and again in its relation to the conditions of the present moment as opposed to the past.
Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir, (Iceland, 1979) is an artist based in Reykjavik. Her work is permeated by issues concerning lived spaces, hospitality, acts and rituals of recollection, familial relations and female identity. Her installations, videos, writings and sculptures are a constant testing and rehearsing of memory and uncertainty, trying to look at spaces from a new angle. In her work she is interested in the potential of the viewer to take the position of the one who remembers and the shifting of points-of-view, the viewer becoming the “I” of the work. In her work Rehearsing Rooms (paper, text and performance) the artist’s mother-in-law’s kitchen, as well as the artist’s own workspace are superimposed onto the exhibition space. The kitchen is represented through a series of texts in which the graphical layout of the words varies. Sentences are strategically placed, enticing the viewer to move around the installation, mimicking the layout of the real -or remembered- kitchen. The room is slowly reconstructed as lines are read: “This is where my father-in-law would be sitting, reading the newspapers over and over”. And another, hung at an eye level, tells; “This is where the calendar would be hanging.”
As a second layer to the piece, the imagined mother-in-law’s kitchen is erased as the artist narratively reconstructs her own working space, her studio. The artist moves through the space articulating where this or that is and gestures towards numerous details that occupy her studio.
The coming together of these two artistic practices under the common title of Acts of Memory creates a reflective space to further explore how we as subjects produce and are produced by memory, endlessly constructing our subject-hood, environment and histories through acts of recall and narration, whether individual or collective, purely personal or indeed cultural.
The project is supported by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Program.