A struggle for your story

Relationships between memory research and contemporary art in the 21st century

Abstract

A typical tendency among contemporary artists over the past 11–15 years has been the production of research-based projects, which are created using methodologies of other scientific fields, in collaboration with experts of social or natural sciences. Some of these can be interpreted within the framework of the interdisciplinary scientific field of memory research. With its fact-based yet intuitive statements, the corpus of knowledge thus generated serves to refine our ramified historical consciousness and collective memory that evolved under postmodern influence. The raw material of the memory researcher artist is factual data obtained by means of a choice of methods and technologies. The reason artists turn to memory research is that they want to more profoundly understand the systems of relations within and among the communities living around them. The artist participates in the process as not just a medium who merely channels the stories of communities in the limelight, but rather as a creative agent who, owing to the studied community’s confidence, opens up doomed-to-be-forgotten moments of personal memory towards collective memory and also contextualises these moments. The compulsion of conservation is thus coupled with a democratic selection in the artist’s praxis. 

Photo: Taken by the author