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Images,Thoughts and Fragments of Memory
in the works of 3 Diasporic Artists
Yvonne Singer
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Director,
MFA Visual Arts
Department of Visual Arts
York University
The archive and the album are both repositories of public and private histories
and speak to the desire to preserve, to collect and to catalogue. Memory and
time are significant in both. Beyond this generalized description, the archive and
album serve different functions and occupy different locations in space, time and
culture. The archive speaks of the past and the act of archiving could proceed
from the need to preserve what no longer exists or what is no longer active.
Institutional archives often function as a site of authority and power. According to
Derrida, the archive is a ‘document of law’ and ‘a place of origin’, where official
documents, related to the public and also restricted to the public, are kept. It is
mainly a retrospective project, a search for meaning in the past to comprehend
the past or the present in relation to the past.
The album has a less formal and official status. It is built in the present to
document, preserve, present private histories; events such as births, weddings,
graduations, family gatherings, birthdays, for the public representation of the
family or the group. It is an unofficial history of a family or a group, often focused
on happy events. …death, violence, sex are not recorded in the family album. It
has power as nostalgia and often as an idealized presentation of a time and
place and people. No one ages and no dies. Time is arrested in the family album.
I will use the frame of the case history to present three artists whose work
constructs memories and histories in various forms of archives and albums.
Rafael Goldchain, Sarindar Dhaliwal and myself can be described as
‘transnational subjects’, who live and work in Canada but share the immigrant
experience of living in and between several cultures and geographic locations. All
of us challenge the notion of truth and blur the boundaries between truth and
fiction in our work. In the Warburgian methodology of creating ‘montage
collisions’ we bring together disparate images to produce visual and
psychological ruptures in our search for meaning and understanding. We also
share experiences of trauma, loss, mourning, remembrance and forgetting. Time
factors significantly in our use of autobiography. Our work can be characterized
as projects of reclamation though the transformation of our experiences in the
artmaking process. As Richard Fung writes in his catalogue essay for Sarindar
Dhaliwal, “objects (and)…, images are repositories of personal and cultural
memory and desire”
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Self-Portrait as
Don Moises Rubinstein Krongold (w/fedora and newspaper bundle)
b. Ostrowiec, Poland, 1902
d. Cuernavaca, México 1980
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Self-Portrait as:
Doña Balbina Baumfeld Szpiegel de Rubinstein
b. Ostrowiec, Poland, 1903
d. Santiago de Chile, 1964
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Self Portrait as:
Mojszes Precelman (older)
b. Poland, 1880’s
d. Poland, early 1940’s
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Rafael Goldchain was born in Chile His family, originally from Poland, is
scattered across the globe from Israel to South America to the United States,
Mexico and Canada. Familial Ground is an autobiographical exhibition that
includes digitally altered self-portrait photographs. The self-portraits in Familial
Ground are detailed re-enactments of family members he has never met but he
painstaking researched through photographs, family archives such as letters, and
narratives elicited from email connections. To quote Rafael, the self-portraits
“ in their specificity can be understood as acts of "naming" linked to mourning
and remembrance. Familial Ground proposes a language of mourning through
self-portraiture and through the conventions of family portrait photography. It
suggests that grounding identity within a familial and cultural history subject to
erasures, geographic displacements, and cultural dislocations entails a process
of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of past familial history while
acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval”.
In Familial Ground, Goldchain stages the absent body within the frame of the
family album. I like Laura Mark’s multi-sensory notion of ‘haptic visuality’ , which
she defines as, the eyes themselves functioning like the organ of touch. I suggest
this notion applies to our cultural and bodily memory when we look at family
photographs to recognize ourselves.
Rafael Goldchain goes on to explain, “As I reached my middle years it became
important to not only retrieve basic historical facts such as family names, dates,
and genealogical relations, but also to attempt to know the world of my ancestors
as a basic foundation of an identity that I could pass on to my son. While I could
access the considerable existing stores of knowledge of Eastern European
Jewish life, knowledge of the pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and their
families only exists in fragments deeply buried within the memories of elderly
relatives.”
He refers to the erasures that his family history was subjected to. His is a work of
mourning and remembrance, of memory, of victims of history, of histories
revised, and histories lost.
Goldchain acknowledges the limitations of his reclamation project. Nevertheless,
he has becomes obsessed with developing an extensive genealogy of his family
and is continuing to photograph himself in the guise of various relatives, and in
the process creating a fictional family album and an archive documenting his
search. He has assumed the burden and responsibility of reconstructing and
preserving his family history all the while acutely self-conscious of the fictions
and even parody embedded in his project and the impossibility of reclaiming what
has been lost.
We understand how photographs in family albums construct our image memory.
Goldchain’s reconstruction of dead relatives by “becoming them” through means
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of his theatrical masquerade and digital manipulations constructs a photographic
visual narrative of his family that emphasizes the subjective nature of history.
Following Rafael Goldchain’ s project, the work of inheritance and the burden of
history continues to be played out in my installation, The Veiled Room, a sitespecific installation, conceived for the ACC Gallery in Weimar, Germany in 1998.
The Veiled Room 1998
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The Veiled Room detail of internior
The Veiled Room, detail of monitor
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The Veiled Room, detail of curtain
We encounter a triangular-shaped room with walls consisting of 2 layers of
diaphanous, opaque white curtains patterned with texts. Situated on the floor at
the apex of the triangle, a television monitor silently plays a video that is looping
a sequence in which a young attractive couple perform their romance in the form
of a mock Romeo and Juliet balcony scene for the camera, over and over again.
The woman stands behind a railing on the edge of a breakwater with the waves
of the sea crashing in the background. The man stands on the stairs below her.
With his arms outstretched towards her, he begins to kneel. The man stumbles
and the woman reacts with fear. The man catches himself from falling down the
stairs and recovers. They embrace, kiss and smiling, turn to the camera. They
are forever young and forever smiling at us and at each other. The exaggerated
style of acting verges on slapstick so there is a moment in the video when it is
not clear whether the man is clowning around or actually sustaining an injury.
While, in this dramatic scenario, the catastrophe is averted and the scene ends
happily, the dark shadow of catastrophe pervades the veiled room.
The first layer of the curtain wall contains selected English and German
quotations from Freud’s standard edition. Excerpts from Civilization and Its
Discontent , The Interpretation of Dreams, the Ego and the Id, Infantile Genital
Organization underscore the importance of the Oedipal conflict in the formation
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of the child’s subjectivity as well as highlighting Freud’s argument that civilization
is founded upon the conflicts within these very family relations. The inside layer
of the curtain is marked with the names of German politicians, philosophers,
artists and writers (including Thomas Mann, Water Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht,
Nietzche, Hitler, members of the Bauhaus, like Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Walter
Gropius and Marlene Dietrich) many of whom lived during the turbulent Weimar
Republic or whose ideas influenced the art and politics of the time. The 46
names are arranged in alphabetical order. Uniformly printed in black gothic
typeface (called fraktur, for me, a signifier of German fascism), the roll call
collapses historical distinctions; Holocaust victims, Nazi sympathizers and
perpetrators, intellectuals, artists receive equal significance. The Weimar
Republic was a time of great cultural innovation and ferment. Its collapse
precipitated the ascendancy of Hitler and the Nazi party. The couple in the video
are marked by the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Weimar Republic as well
as the subsequent world war and Holocaust. The spectre of historical
catastrophe and exile haunts the space of the veiled room unsettling the
boundaries between normalcy and danger. It suggests other echoes too as
history seeps into the present, imprinting its afterimage everywhere.
The couple in the video are my parents on holiday in Rockport, Massachusetts,
USA in the early 1950s. They grew up in a comfortable bourgeois milieu in
Budapest, Hungary. The German language and culture were the legacy of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here the new world and the old world are juxtaposed.
In 1949, they emigrated to Montreal, Canada. I grew up as a Christian, in
Montreal, awkwardly self-conscious and unaware of my Jewish identity until
many years later but painfully marked by difference; alienated from my peers as
an immigrant child who didn’t speak English and excluded from the history of my
parents who placed a veil of secrecy on the past. The family album of
photographs of my parents’ life in Budapest before the war were the stuff of my
fantasy and more real to me than my own life.
My memory and its transformation into art fits Marianne Hirsch’s definition of
‘post-memory’
“.Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to
its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an
imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experience
of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose
own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation,
shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.”
The world of my parents that was destroyed was not mine. The world where I
found myself was also not mine. While Rafael recreated a family album and
Sarindar Dhaliwal created a collage of her real and imagined worlds, I was
invisible, situated between 2 worlds and without the language to speak either. My
project has been to become claim a space for myself, to collect, connect and
construct the fragments of experiences in a some kind of into a coherent whole.
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At the same time, I am aware of the elusive, unstable nature of memory, history
and subjectivity. I also want to make this evident in the work I construct.
.
To illustrate this, I include 2 texts from my exhibition, In memoriam: forgetting and
remembering fragments of history (1993)
In memoriam:forgetting and remembering fragments of history;
The Felt Room 1993
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In memoriam:forgetting and remembering fragments of history; The Felt
Room, detail LED
Text for L.E.D.
LISTEN CAREFULLY……
THIS IS…..IMPORTANT……………..
LOOK AT ME, WATCH ME………….
SWEDISH DIPLOMAT……………….
SAVES…………..100,000 JEWS IN BUDAPEST………………………..
RAOUL WALLENBERG…………SCION OF A WEALTHY FAMILY………….
AND A……..NON-JEW……..
AT GREAT PERSONAL RISK………………………
SINGLE HANDEDLY SAVED MORE JEWS THAN WHOLE GOVERNMENTS…………
THIS “ANGEL OF RESCUE” WAS KIDNAPPED BY THE RED ARMY AND
NEVER SEEN AGAIN OUTSIDE A SOVIET PRISON…………………………
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SORRY……………..I…………………..CAN’’T………………………………
HEAR YOU……………………………SORRY…………………..SORRY……………….
I CAN’T SEE YOU…………………………………………………………………………..
WALLENBERG DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A HERO……………………………
HE WAS NOT THE SQUARE - JAW TYPE……………………………….
HIS SLIGHTLY BALDING HEAD MADE HIM LOOK TOO YOUNG AND
SENSITIVE……………………………………………………………………
FOR THE NIGHTMARISH JOB AHEAD…………………………………
CLASSMATES RECALL HIM AS WARM AND FRIENDLY, NOT SNOBBISH……….
HE WAS NOT FEARLESS BY NATURE………………………………………………….
I AM TELLING YOU A STORY WHICH I CANNOT TELL………………………………
(I HAVE BEEN SWORN TO SECRECY)………………………………
WE LISTEN WE HEAR WE SPEAK
WE SPEAK WE HEAR WE LISTEN
WE LISTEN WE HEAR WE SPEAK………………………………………………….
SOME BELIEVE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SURVIVE SOVIET PRISON FOR SO MANY
YEARS…………………………………………………………………………………..
OTHERS BELIEVE A MAN LIKE WALLENBERG MIGHT………………………..
DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A HERO………………………………
OVERLY PROMINENT NOSE……….WEAK CHIN…………………………..
THINNING HAIR……..TOO SOFT…….TOO CEREBRAL…………………..
I……………WAS…………………………….TRYING TO…………………………..
FORGET…………..NO……………I MEAN……………….
I…………………………….WAS…………………………………………………….
TRYING TO………………………………………………………REMEMBER……….
AND…………………………………….IN JULY 1944……………………………………
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AT THE AGE OF 32…………………THIS SCION OF AN ARISTOCRATIC FAMILY
………………….OF SWEDISH LUTHERANS………………………………
………………..BANKERS AND INDUSTRIALISTS…………………………….
HE HAD A CONSUMING SENSE OF DUTY
HE WAS A DRIVEN MAN
HE WAS A GREAT ACTOR AND COULD IMITATE BRILLIANTLY………………….
MYSTERY SURROUNDS THE FATE OF THE SWEDE WHO SAVED THE JEWS
………………………….SORRY…………………………..I…………………………..
……………..FORGOT……………………………SORRY………………I……………
CAN’T…………………………. REMEMBER……………………AND……………….
IN THE PRIVACY OF EMPTY ROOMS………………………………………………..
I………………………………………………YOU……………………………………
In memoriam:forgetting and remembering fragments of history; The Glass
Room, 1993
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In memoriam: forgetting and remembering fragments of history, the grandfather
shelf (detail)
“When I was younger, I always had fantasies abut what it would be like to
be in solitary confinement. I would imagine my restricted cell, with a
cement floor, stone walls, a small grilled window, too high to reach, and I
would imagine how I would pass the time. Would I have enough resources
inside my head to keep me going? How many songs and poems could I
remember? I was told that my grandfather had a prodigious memory. He
could remember all the words to over 100 songs and could speak several
languages. I thought, he would do well in solitary confinement.”
Absence, loss and mourning are also hallmarks of the work of Sarindar Dhaliwal.
Sarindar Dhaliwal was born in India, grew up in England of the fifties and sixties,
returned to England for art school and then established herself in Canada. She
continues to travel frequently, moving between cultures but at home in none.
The racism she experienced in England marked her as an outsider. She knew
she could never be ‘English’. The trauma of the immigrant child in addition to her
encounter with loss through death and personal tragedies, took years to manifest
itself in her art practice. Through the transformative process of artmaking,
Sarindar creates psychological and fictive spaces, like the Akashic Library, where
she can imagine what she likes and make dreams come true
Dr. Bernadette Buckley writing in Dhaliwal’s exhibition catalogue, Record
Keeping. (2004)
“Dhaliwal strives to understand her own history by creating and keeping her own
records. And it is in this way- by piecing together her own memories and
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transformations of the past - that Dhaliwal avoids producing a prescriptive
account of her history. Thus (her work) is less about ‘the past’ per se than it is
about those processes of creation/narration that allow us to hold on to what is
meaningful from the past, by changing it into something new.”
the book of yellow and curtains for babel x, y &z ,both from 2003 are the two
works I will discuss. Inspired by the idea of the Akashic Library, these works are
evidence of the archive; in Dhaliwal’s hands, they constitute ‘a fictive archive,
replete with possibilities’ (Jan Allen, Record Keeping, catalogue 2004) According
to metaphysical teachings, the Akashic Library or Records is a universal library
where there is a permanent record of everything that has been said, thought and
done in the past and future.
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the book of yellow is a series of beautifully bound books of handmade papers,
modeled on the bound editions of local newspapers found in the Heritage Library
in Port of Spain, Trinidad where Sarindar Dhaliwal had a residency.
In the book of yellow, the names, saffron, tumeric, quercitron, ambergris, annatto,
ochre and Naples yellow, Indian yellow, jaundice, lemon, mustard yellow, canary,
Mars yellow are embossed on the spines of 4 large volumes. The books are
inaccessible for reading. Their content is unknown and so we are left with our
own associations to the evocative words on the spine which suggest exotic
places, other cultures and arcane knowledge or mystery, cultural differences. Out
of curiosity, I looked up the dictionary definition of, yellow and found the synonym
for yellow is cowardly, treacherous. Words and colors, and a beautiful object are
linked together in a seductive but unsettling chain of signifiers.
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curtains for babel, x,y&z is inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges as well
as the biblical story of the tower of Babel. Borges’ story takes place in a library,
similar in concept to the Akashic Library, containing all the books , ever written in
all languages, living and dead. In Dhaliwal’s work 28 multi-colored curtains are
hung against a black wall. 21 of the pairs open to reveal the name of a
threatened indigenous language spoken in the nation written below in white
script. All the languages begin with x, y and z and are arranged alphabetically;
Xedi for Nigeria; Yaeyama for Japan; Zazoo for the Solomon Islands etc.
The orderliness in the arrangement of the elements (curtains and text) references
a filing system, an ethnographic documentation that suggests dead languages,
dead cultures, dead people. However, the chalk writing of these names is
ephemeral and easily erased. The underlying pessimism of the piece undermines
the cheerfulness of the colors in the curtains
For Dhaliwal, color and language are central tropes signifying cultural difference
and activating remembering and forgetting.
Photographic images, language, objects, color, texture, paint, fabric, archives,
albums, geographic and imaginative spaces and structures are some of the
elements used by the three artists in their layered, poignant accounts of past and
present, absence and presence, remembering and forgetting, loss and
reclamation. This brief overview presents several visual strategies and aesthetic
structures transforming traumatic autobiographic experiences into
representations of memory and history.
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