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Every new telling of a story perfects its narrative but
also rearranges, edits and moves it further from its original,
authentic plot. What do we remember? How do we remember and
retell stories of the past? How do we project them into the
future?
In his book of essays, Idea of Prose, the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines the concept of the "immemorable"
as that which "skips from memory to memory without itself
ever coming to mind [and which] is, properly speaking, the
unforgettable." This immemorable, or unforgettable, is
an unconscious element that infiltrates the conscious memory
and creates an involuntary memory. As Agamben further explains,
"The memory that brings back to us the thing forgotten
is itself forgetful of it and this forgetfulness is its light.
It is, however, from this that its burden of longing comes:
an elegiac note vibrates so enduringly in the depths of every
human memory that, at the limit, a memory that recalls nothing
is the strongest memory." Located in the space between
remembrance and forgetfulness, the conscious and unconscious,
the immemorable brings to mind another concept, that of modernist
nostalgia—a future-oriented longing for something that
never existed.
The Russian writer and theorist Svetlana Boym defines a type
of nostalgia that is restorative, that tries to reconstruct
the lost root that nobody remembers. Reflexive nostalgia,
on the other hand, does not try to reconstruct a space, but
rather reflects its strength, power and time and can thus
be not only retrospective but also prospective, directed towards
the future. It is a thought of the past as a potential; i.e.,
it is about "watching dreams" through which we can
think about the future. This triangle between Forgotten -
Reconstructed - Projected forms a field on which the works
in this exhibition inscribe their narratives, (un)intentionally
taking up the roles of nostalgia triggers, causing perhaps
brief and fragmented awakenings. These works point to the
social impact of the invisible boundaries delineated by past
and future expectations, drawing attention to the intersections
of the psychological, social and physical spaces and memories
that have been constructed in order to formulate cohesion
between individual and collective histories.
The artist Artur Zmijewski met a German girl, Lisa, in Israel
and made her the protagonist of his video of the same name.
Inspired by a divine revelation, Lisa moves from Germany to
Israel to start her new life there, claiming she is a reincarnation
of a Jewish boy murdered at the age of 12 by the Nazis. Despite
the fact that her living conditions in Israel are far from
ideal and that most of the people there find her story absurd
and appalling, she is persistent in not giving up on her beliefs.
In Lisa's case, the collective feeling of guilt for the past
deeds of Nazi Germany is a starting point for her nostalgia
for the future that directs her radical decision.
The story actually has the structure of a medieval quest:
The hero, or in this case heroine, embarks on a journey, begun
in the context of an unfair and cruel social order. The quest
ends in the establishment of a new, more just society. With
its medieval literary form, the contemporary story appears
romanticized and fanciful, leading to associations with heroism,
belief, dream, change, revolution, and personal sacrifice.
In the observer, these associations produce either contempt
for the heroine's naiveté or nostalgia for the imagined
time and belief that seems to have been there since long in
the past, but is now irretrievably lost.
Zbynek Baladran, in KOLDOM, is inspired by the idea
of an ideal apartment drawn by the Czech modernist architect
Karel Honzik, which today is just a forgotten utopia. In KOLDOM,
a simple pen drawing that the artist creates from memory becomes
the archeological transcript of the modernist idea. The accompanying
work, Glossary, takes the form of a poster where Baladran
connects thoughts about modernity, divergent historical scenarios
and a personal view of memory to touch upon utopian visions
of the grand narrative of modernism that was characterized
by a desire to wipe out the past in order to make space for
a radically new, true present. As a result, today, when it
seems that we are unable to create a brave new future based
on our present, we are inclined to look for new sources of
life through imaginative encounters with the past.
In Footnote #5, by Alejandro Cesarco, a barely noticeable
asterisk takes center stage in the form of Letraset on the
wall. The title of the work straightforwardly suggests its
function, while the sentence at the bottom is given to describe
the empty, referenced place: "To me, this has always
been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the
way people talk about loving things, which things and why."
Just as the asterisk sign denoting a footnote seems to be
fixed to an anonymous space, so the pronoun "this"
in the footnote stands for an anonymous signifier and the
even more anonymous signified. The mystery here is the mystery
of language and love – the mystery of an unlimited number
of word combinations that somehow never seem to reach the
invisible target. As if knowing numerous ways to get there,
but unaware of where the target is, the words locate the “this“
on the empty page for which the asterisk is searching. The
work is an expression of a nostalgic insight into the inadequacy
of language or, more precisely, the impossibility of reaching
a satisfying connection between things, between people and
things, and that which is signified as love. The footnote
in the show refers to an indeterminate place filled with potential
for resurrecting a slower time of love and contemplation.
Felix Gmelin's Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, shows
two screens—one shot in 1968 in Berlin and the other
shot in 2002 in Stockholm. In the first short film, a young
man (the artist's father) runs through the streets of West
Berlin in 1968 with a red flag to join other youth activists
on the balcony of a government building. In Stockholm in 2002,
artists re-enact the scene, but the conclusion isn't as glorifying.
They don't find any young activists. Gmelin's work is a comment
on today's situation of political indifference of youth and
an expression of nostalgia for the "real," before
irony. It represents the post-historical and postmodern recalling
of the past that could also stand for a nostalgic escape to
an idealized, simpler era of real community values.
Sanja Ivekovic's installation Ponos (Pride) features
the reconstructed red neon sign of a former textile shop that
existed in socialist Yugoslavia, where such monumental terms
as Freedom, Knowledge, Unity and Victory were used as the
names of diverse businesses. In the era of new transitional
economy, these names were replaced with foreign or quasi-international
ones such as X Nation, Eldi International, Terranova, etc.
These new signs in the urban space are the marks of the takeover
of new, Western capital. The artist’s restoration of
an old neon sign, which she brings into the gallery environment,
is an unpretentious political gesture where the meaning of
the word is emptied of its monumentality and becomes a benign,
almost modernist artifact recalling the political, and pointing
towards the problematics of present and the future of the
transitional state of Croatia, rather than its past.
David Maljkovic's works revolve around the emblematic architecture
of the Memorial Centre for a Partisan Hospital designed by
the modernist artist Vojin Bakic in 1981. The expressive and
distinct style of these buildings are perceived as time capsules,
spaces so intensively charged by their own era that they become
a means of transfer for spiritual heritage relevant to both
the present and the future. In a series of drawings and collages,
the artist contemplates and envisions the possible future
use of these archeological sites, offering, with refined irony,
the possible "imaginarium" of new modernism(s).
Imagining the future leads to nostalgia for the era that should
appear. We can only envision this future in a poetical sense
through the nostalgic gaze towards the past.
In the work It Doesn't Matter, the artist Katerina
Seda discovers that her now-apathetic and introverted grandmother
remembers, to the last detail, all of the items she once dealt
with as an employer in a tool shop in a small village in Moravska
during socialism. Seda documents her process of remembering
as she makes a never-ending series of drawings of various
tools from the store. The awakened memory functions as a trigger
for returning to the present and, as the artist explains,
a tool for constant resurrection from inactivity.
In the work Devrim (Revolution), Ahmet Ogut makes
a wall drawing of the Devrim car that was originally
produced in Turkey in 1961 in the era of Turkish modernization.
Next to the drawing is an accompanying text that gives an
explanation of how the car, the first produced in Turkey,
was made by order of the president of the Turkish Republic
and taken by train to Ankara for him to test drive. As the
engineers forgot to fill the tank with petrol, the car stopped
after only 20 feet. The artist plays with the anecdote, ironizing
a new nostalgia for the period of Turkish modernization that
represents an ongoing invention and an object of restorative
nostalgia. As the Turkish writer Esra Ozyurek points out,
in a political constellation in which Kemalist Turks cannot
locate modernity in the present or future of Turkey, or in
the present of Europe, a specific form of non-Western modernity
is being sought in the party regime of the early Republic.
In this era that is not only post-historical but also post-political,
we turn to a form of "new modern" that is being
internalized or even poeticized through an abstract idea that
intertwines the past with the nostalgic prospect of the future
through storytelling. Although using divergent languages and
narrative procedures to bind together what might have been
with what might come, the works in the exhibition find their
root in an in-between zone of dissolutions and beliefs of
the power of the past and the potential of the future. Navigating
not only with retrospective but also prospective nostalgia
through the real and imagined territories of time, the works
here formulate an unstable and fragmentary cartography—a
cartography that reveals how the personal and communal immemorable
come together in the expectations of the new modern.
References:
Agamben, Giorgio. Idea of Prose. Translated by Michael Sullivan
and Sam Whitsitt. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books,
2002.
Özyürek, Esra. Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism
and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham: Duke University Press,
2006.
Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago
© 2007
Antonia Majaca & Ivana Bago are the curators of G-MK|
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, a non-profit contemporary art
space in Zagreb, Croatia |
