Memories

The exhibition Memories #2 presents works by Danish and international artists who illuminate and examine the phenomenon of memories in different ways, materially as well as thematically and culturally, through the photographic medium or other time-based media such as video and film.

Since the invention of photography, remembrance has been inevitable associated with photography by virtue of the medium's ability to retain and depict personal as well as historical and collective events. In its own way, the photograph can be both a bearer of memory and a catalyst for evoking or recalling memories by virtue of its ability to depict, convey and maintain the past in the present and the future. At the same time, memory can also be associated with forgetting or excluding other narratives and perspectives on history.

The works in the exhibition will illuminate memory in different ways, both materially, in the form of experiments with the materiality and possibilities of photography as a physical object, as well as thematically in the form of personal or collective memory and history. Likewise, the exhibition will touch on how memory is also connected to the photographic image culture in a wider social context, both physically and digitally, and how archives and the technological development have an influence on memory and our ability to remember.

Part of an exhibition series
The exhibition Memories #2 is part of a three-year series of exhibitions that annually, through a theme, focus on some of the special characteristics associated with photography as a medium. It is our aim that the series of exhibitions will contribute to examine and discussing photography's current artistic and cultural role. The exhibition Memories #2 is the second in the three-year exhibition series (Disappearances #1 was shown in 2023).

In the period 2023-2026, Fotografisk Center will also carry out a research project (PhD scholarship), supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, on documentary art photography, which will create new knowledge and research about art photography in Denmark. We want to create synergy and connection between the research project and the three-year series of exhibitions in, among other things, communication and events, as the research project also relates to questions about photography's artistic and cultural role.