What do we remember? Have you ever doubted your own memories? Do you agree that our interests and thoughts are biased and that other concepts or ideals are alienated and rejected without our conscientious effort?
The exhibition ‘Over Here : Specific Moments’ celebrates the moments that the artists captured from our everyday lives. Through different perspectives and expressions of artists living in the contemporary era, we are able to see both sides of the argument.
Maharani Mcanagara explores Indonesia's modern and contemporary history based on personal and family experiences.
One of the records was of the '1915-1935 Indonesian Education History', found in the diary of her grandfather whom she never met. The Buru Island concentration camp and 'the National Tragedy G30S (30 September Movement)' also had pages detailing their events. The artist working on the theme of memories began by exploring their close environment and their family to find her identity. Another artist, whose works are built on the basis of Bandung, Indonesia, focuses on Indonesia's tragic incident to bring attention to the issues and the history.
The artist Tarajay interprets others' memories as if they were her own through conversation. She then works on expanding those memories and records to various media, including publications, videos, and exhibitions to give them a voice. She has been working on the < Memory Archive Project > purposed to 'find happy memories and leave behind memories that people want to forget'. In the exhibition, the artist explores each other's recording styles with artist Maharani and leaves new records and traces in the archive.
In addition, during the exhibition period, she ran an initiative to write a novel with the unknown memories through discussions with female audiences from various age groups. Even though most of the original housing complexes were demolished during the redevelopment of Wolsan-dong, the exhibition space of OverLab. continues to experiment with 'artistic records'. In the exhibition, ‘Specific Moments’ refers to the moment when an artist reconstructs and records history and memories.
The exhibition seeks to ask the audience questions about artistic records through the two writers' recording methods of dealing with memories. This allows us to see how one's work continues on its own from the artist to one's recording method, in particular, it shows that Indonesia and Korea can move in the same direction despite having different backgrounds and social formats. We look forward to continuing our record keeping in this fashion to answer the questions of 'what we remember' and 'why we remember'.
(Written by_Gahye Kim)