The exhibition “The Struggle of Memory” at the Popular Palace until March 11, 2024 highlights the importance of memory in the formation of personal and collective identity, as well as in the struggle against oblivion in the face of slavery and colonialism, and their lingering effects. This exhibition offers an in-depth reflection on these crucial themes through the works of renowned contemporary artists.
“The first step in liquidating a people… is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then ask someone to write new books, create a new culture, invent a new history. Before long, this nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” This excerpt from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) by author Milan Kundera clearly explains the importance of memory in preserving a community’s cultural heritage and identity.
Man’s struggle against power is intrinsically linked to memory’s struggle against oblivion. The contemporary artists participating in this exhibition seek to respond to this need to restore memory by devoting their artistic practice to the preservation of memories, reconstruction, re-imagination and restoration.
Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, “The Struggle of Memory” first presents Deutsche Bank’s acquisitions over the past decade. Many of the works in the collection were created by African artists or artists of African descent. This artistic concentration on the dark continent within their collection stems in part from the influence of the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, former groundbreaking director of documenta 11 and member of Deutsche Bank’s Global Advisory Council on Art.
In addition to these works from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the exhibition is divided into two parts, each approaching the exploration of memory in a singular and profound way. The first part of “The Struggle of Memory” focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting works that explore in different ways how the body ingests, processes, stores and remembers experiences. The second part analyzes how memories are inscribed, bringing together compositions that interrogate the traces of history in the natural environment, while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive, strategies for looking at the past.
Anawana Haloba’s installation, which occupies the main dome of the Popular Palace, marks the starting point of the group show. Entitled “Close-Up“, this installation consists of roughly cut pieces of salt suspended high above the ground, and will be featured in both parts of “The Struggle of Memory“. The piles of salt are fed with water and gradually dissolve in the bowls below, providing a poetic backdrop to the exhibition space. This unusual arrangement appears as a metaphor for human bodily fluids, the fragility of native languages and the historical importance of salt as a medium of exchange.
The vast majority of the artists in the exhibition stand at the edge of the barrier between the known and the unknown. Kara Walker, for example, blends slave narratives and historical novels into starting points that are not intended to offer a simple record of the past. Meanwhile, Berni Searle captivates audiences with her fragrant work “Traces 1999″, which depicts the body as a vehicle of memory while highlighting its fragility. Mohamed Camara’s intimate photographs, from his collective work “Certains matins 2006“, regularly transcend the barriers of the tangible, helping to create a ghostly atmosphere in the artistic space, confounding presence and absence.
In an almost similar artistic approach, Lebohang Kganye uses family archives in an attempt to fill gaps in memory, while exploring notions of fantasy and the creation of identity. Samuel Fosso’s self-portraits suggest a playful and captivating approach to representation. The works of Toyin Ojih Odutola and Wangechi Mutu, with their respective accumulations of marks and fragments, allow for the emergence of new, unusual narratives on the edge of the imaginable. To conclude this innovative artistic journey offered by these contemporary artists through “The Struggle of Memory“, Mikhael Subotzky presents the video installation “Moses and Griffiths, 2012″, a multimedia work that explores the gaps and exploits the spillovers between personal narratives and official histories.
These paired works reveal the possibilities of visual storytelling and the importance of reconstructing links with the past in the gaps left by history. In “The Struggle of Memory“, art appears as a means of reconnecting with the past and rediscovering the blind spots left in the narratives handed down for generations.
