Memory Palimpsests: Creative Approaches to Memory

Thinking of palimpsests in relation to extraction and sustainability, invisibility and silences, embodiment and affect, speculation and divergent futurisms, this presentation - in part inspired by Andreas Huyssen's notion of "memory palimpsests and their multi-directional layerings", and in response to the conference theme 'Communities and Change' - attempts to critically examine how art contributes to the development of memory studies through a layering of prism.

The artworks will be presented on screens throughout the conference. Please join us on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday lunchtime for a series of conversations in response to the artwork with the artists and members of the Memory and Arts working group.

List of Artists and Artworks:

Sława Harasymowicz, Field, videowork, 5'515, 2023. Showing Wednesday 5th July and Friday 7th July.

This new work, while drawing on the artist's research, primarily uses material recorded during trips to the former concentration camp in Hamburg Neuengamme district in 2021-2022. Situated in the rural Vierlande region and surrounded by expansive fertile farmlands, the camp's modernist factory complex forms an island of sorts, "Neuengamme" which literally means a new island. The film asks a simple question: how can the subversive potential of personal memory (then) and direct experience of place (now) be harnessed through the medium of the artist's film in developing speculative work in the context of actual historical trauma? The archive, instead of leading the film, forms rather a glitch in what appears to be a straightforward documentary. The duration of the work reflects the number once assigned to the artist's relative who perished as a Neuengamme prisoner.

Mirta Kupferminc, The Name and the Number, videowork, 8:06, 2010. Showing Wednesday 5th July and Friday 7th July.

The film begins, plunging the viewer into confusion, a sense of not understanding; of what is happening and what one is supposed to feel.. As with the palimpsest, different contents and representations are superimposed, established through the action of embroidery and the inscribing of a tattoo, a tension between the inheritance of beauty and horror, carried out by the same tool: the needle. The artist writes: "Both circumstances, the embroidery and the tattoo appear throughout my life, transmitted via my Hungarian mother. On the one hand, this is activated with reference to the joy for ornament, and on the other the trauma caused by the profanation of the body when numbers are tattooed onto the body of prisoners of Auschwitz. I grew up embraced by numbered arms."

Domingo Martinez, Remnants, videowork, 4.56, 2017. Showing Wednesday 5th July and Friday 7th July.

Martinez's video explores the use of moving image as a challenge to text-based research on collective and cultural memory studies. With a focus on the experiences of visiting monuments and physical contact with sites of memory, this piece aims to convey the Proustian idea of memory as something triggered by an intense sensory experience. The video portrays how this memory work provides new insights into the personal memories that shape our sense and self, as well as the collective, cultural and historical memories on which societies build their identities. Remnants continues the theme of haunting within our landscapes, and the multi-layered experiences of memories acting out through the physical and imagined palimpsest in our daily experiences.

Katya Oicherman, I wish I could, 2:00 2019 and Oh, my dear one, 7:00 2011, videoworks. Showing Tuesday 4th July and Thursday 6th July.

Oicherman's ongoing project involves intense observation and animation of her family photo archive which documents six generations of her family living in North-West Russia/USSR and Israel between 1880s and 2009. Whilst many stories in this archive are lost or turned into family folklore, it is the textiles in the photographs, their patterns and structures, that remain stable and easily recognizable signs. These are common, mass-produced materials encountered in the common social and historical settings. Similarly her earliest memories are linked to textiles, such as bed linen or towels and those she has seen as a child in the family photographs. Perhaps this memory shifted her towards becoming textile artist and historian, in itself becoming the motif (a pattern) and a motive (a cause for action).

I wish I could (2019) is the result of Oicherman finding a small photograph of her grandmother and her twin brother taken in 1922, probably in St Petersburg. It shows two infants sitting on a striped cloth, staring at the camera. The artist did not know her grandmother's twin, so the photograph evoked a a simultaneous remoteness and immediacy, a realization that great parts of her grandmother's life, and the experience of historical events she lived through, remain unknowable to the artist. The striped cloth becomes a stubborn shred, a ghost of memory, a desire to remember that does not go away.

Oh, My Dear One (2012) presents a long cloth with Hebrew embroidery rolled between the hands of Oicherman's mother and grandmother. The cloth is a Torah binder, a ritual wrapper of the Torah scroll. Oicherman made the embroidery in collaboration with her mother as a reinvention of an old German Jewish custom of making the binder from the swaddling cloth used on the day of the baby boy's circumcision. The embroidery traditionally mentions the boy's name and date of birth, to become a kind of a birth certificate. Oicherman's work provides her name and that of her grandmothers, including dates of birth. It is made from her old nappies that were made into pillowcases by her grandmother. The film shows the connection between the three generations of women, claiming their place and history in the Jewish ritual commonly privileging men. The song playing is called "My dear one", possibly written in the 1920s by a Russian-Jewish romantic composer Lev Drizo, performed in the USSR by many popular singers. Oicherman's mother used to sing it as a lullaby, next to the bed covered with the same textiles that later became the embroidered fabric.

Mischa Twitchin, "Do we still remember?" that include The Children's Emperor and The Pianist, 14: 00, 2015 and The Warsaw Ghetto, 13mins, 2023, videoworks. Showing Tuesday 4th July and Thursday 6th July.

The diptych of The Children's Emperor and the Pianist present two films that are based on a live performance (previously shown in London, Berlin, and Lisbon) that draw on Wladislaw Szpilman's autobiography, The Pianist. The second film, titled The Warsaw Ghetto, similarly involves a montage of historically specific sounds and images, with a recording of Andrzej Czajkowski (Warsaw, 1955), text by Piotr Pazinski, and photographs from contemporary central Warsaw (to be shown for the first time in Newcastle). The films counterpoint the time and place of the sound recordings with those of the photographs to produce (or perhaps instantiate) an image of cultural memory that is at once materially and historically specific and yet virtual. The title of the proposal is taken from a poster that appeared across Warsaw last summer, as part of a public information campaign run by the city in relation to Ukrainian refugees fleeing from Russia's ongoing war of aggression. The work engages with the writings of, for instance, Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler, discussing cultural memory as a present past that the technology of both the photo- and phono-graphic makes possible. While the films offer an apparent "unity" of the photo- and phono-graphic, as if the materials were "given" in and by the example of the montage, critical reflection immediately recognises that their relation is constructed. Thus, one might ask the question: what may have been presupposed culturally for such a technical construction to be seen as having a "narrative" continuity of its own?