We often think of memories as infallible truths. But the reality is that they are unreliable, constantly changing and subjective. The group show ‘Lieux de Mémoire’ (meaning ‘sites of memory’) explores the implications of this on a historical and political level. These artists all revisit history in order to question accepted versions of events.
In ‘Player 1972’, Anglo-American David Birkin presents a virtual reality headset showing the 1972 European Cup football final between West Germany and the USSR, with a transcript of a declassified Nato training exercise from the period as commentary. The effect is alienating and extremely powerful. This is complimented by ‘Iconographies’, Birkin’s Cold War-era press photographs, with the likes of Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat still bearing the editor’s crop marks – suggesting the way that truth gets trimmed over time.
In dual projections, Nasan Tur portrays conflicting yet interrelated memories: accounts of a patch of ‘no-man’s land’ in Cyprus, created by the Turkish invasion of 1974. Nadia Kaabi-Linke looks at how we commemorate events and locate memories by presenting 400 soil samples taken from an area that surrounds 400 US military graves
in her native Tunisia. Each sample is labelled with a corresponding social security number and displayed as part of a wall-mounted grid. By rationalising trauma, she makes the uncomfortable suggestion that memorials remember so that we don’t have to.
Peter Yeung