Gerrit Rietveld Graduation painting series, 2013

Poetics of memory

Family memory portraits, 2021-22

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This project provides a different angle to my research on the impermanence of memory.

 

I began this project after going through some family pictures. While examining these pictures, I discovered that some family members look very different in contemporary reality than in my memories, as if these memories are 'frozen' in time.

 

In my mental image of my mother, she has chestnut brown hair, as she did during my teenage years, while her actual hair color at that time was white. This highlights the tensions between the static nature of certain memories and the dynamic, constantly changing reality of others. In this case, the fixation of memories in my mind is not subject to the development we observe in daily life, which leads me to wonder how and why some memories remain so fixed, even as the people and situations around us continue to change.