2015 Memory Lab – Photography Challenges History at Casino, Art Forum Luxembourg

As part of the 5th edition of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg, Café Crème asbl is curating “Transit / Memory Lab – Photography challenges History” at Casino, Forum d’art contemporain Luxembourg. “Memory Lab “is divided into four parts according to the different venues in Luxembourg.

Casino Luxembourg Forum of Contemporary Art shows Memory Lab III: subtitled Transit, with works by Adrian Paci, Aura Rosenberg and Vladmir Nikolić .

The videos and photographs of Memory Lab III show how “past and present” are crossed by a dialectic imagery that puts the viewer in “transit” through a re-contextualization of personal experience and collective history. The video “The First Murder“ of Vladimir Nikolić is a re-writing of the assassination of Yougoslav King Alexander I to in Marseille in 1934. The artist is juxtaposing the 1934 movie with photo shots done in 2004 by placing the cameras at the exact same places. One way for the artist to question the media coverage of tragic events in the context of the trivialization of today’s image. Similarly, the personal history and collective history are the focus of many projects of Adrian Paci, Albanian artist living in Milan. His work “Lives in Transit” (2013) or “Home to go“ (2001) evokes social and moral conflicts around the notion of identity in an immigration context. Aura Rosenberg, referring to Walter Benjamin, in her series “The Angel of History“ (2013) revives “the ruins and the progress of history” in a post-modern compilation that takes the viewer on a whirlwind of history.

Beyond the desire to revive the story in the dialectic of these artistic proposals “Memory Lab – History Photography Challenges“ stages moments of tension where the image re-presented puts itself at a distance from the ordinary itself from the ordinary media-stream as well as the traditional archived document.