Darren Almond, Brenda L. Croft, Zhang Huan, Whitfield Lovell, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, Fiona Tan
Memories comprise the larger substance of our thoughts. They are the stuff of our humanity and what raise us above mere mechanism. If we come to be aware of the way in which our memories differ from actual events, we see the motivations and inhibitions that lie behind what we remember. For what we remember is as much, if not more, a matter of what we relegate to silence. The recent exhibition 'Witness' assembled five artists and an artist group who explore the nature of memory in their work. Without reflection or scrutiny, 'memory' is a voluminous and overly abstract basis for an artwork, since all art is, to some extent, a memory of something. When artists engage directly with memory, then the problem at the heart of representation itself the impossibility of an absolute and correct image of something-is bound to follow. With representation, as with memory, it is equally the embattled issue of truth that gets in the way and ultimately supplies the tension within the uncovering and concealment of an image or idea. With memory as with truth, it is only 'truly' itself when conscious of its deficiencies. When truth thinks it is whole then it is following a very different and dangerous moral direction.
Brenda L. Croft's In My Mother's Garden, 1998, was a multitude of images which had the look of fragments from a longer and only partially remembered sequence. This is the way of all memory, partial and often indiscriminate in what it chooses to bring forth, although the selectiveness of Croft's sequence suggests a stronger repression, as if the images have risen to the surface after having resided for a long while in