I’m gone. Do you remember me?
Opening 22 February 2024, 7PM
7.30PM Performance Cesare Viel
Curated by Francesca Verga and Zasha Colah
Arbeitsgemeinschaft (working group): Noor Abed (PS), Noor Abuarafeh (PS), Anna Boghiguian (EG), Cristian Chironi (IT), Muna Mussie (ER/IT), Masatoshi Noguchi (JP), Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa (UK/IT), Bea Orlandi (IT), Adrian Paci (AL/IT), Moira Ricci (IT), Jessica Russo (IT), Becky Shaw (UK), Cesare Viel (IT).
“Before an aneurysm wiped out my memory,” writes Rosalind Krauss in Under Blue Cup, “I was a writer and art critic.” During the process of rebuilding her memory in the wake of trauma, Krauss realizes that she has forgotten everything, but if you remember who you are, you can actually learn to remember everything.
In a historical moment of trauma and erasure, of violence and humiliation, of absence and forgetting, the imaginative act of memory and its re-creation becomes an act of possible resistance. Ar/Ge Kunst presents a group exhibition about everything that can be imagined, orchestrated and acted out, when we strive to recall what we no longer remember.
What is lost is manifold: some people have lost their family, some their land, some their roots, some their affections, some a love, while some no longer have anything material left. In the epidemic of memories (facilitated by digital media), only their rewriting survives, which once exhumed, have the chance to come back to life. But their exhumation is necessarily performative and involves an act which itself subverts the rules of remembering.
The exhibition brings together people who, in the creation of the artistic act, bring out certain echoes from the past, present and future, making them part of a unique time, and exercising the political and salvific power of the reconstruction process.
Exhibition Design: Studio Gisto, Alessandro Mason, Alice Cazzolato and Pietro Lora
Produced by: Studio Gisto and Stefano Riba
Thank you to: Libera Università di Bolzano, Archivio Video di Careof, Emi Fontana, Pinksummer (Genova), Museion (Atelier), Hotel Laurin.
Image: Becky Shaw with Michael Gill, from the work Twelve Museums (2004).
The title of the exhibition is taken from a screenplay written by the American artist Mike Kelley, Under a Sheet/Existence Problems, undated. Mike Kelley collection.
