Rear View Mirror: Historical memory and contemporary culture
18 September – 7 November 2004
How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment?
Rear View Mirror set out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses, from nostalgia and aesthetics to fashion and ideology.
The work in this exhibition dealt with a range of historical events; some universally significant, like the Holocaust, and some personal, like the suicide of a promising young photographer. What brought these artists together is not a concern with the historical event itself, but an interest in the fugitive and malleable nature of memory. Each artist approached the notion of historical memory as a construction; their works revealed the unstable boundary between fact and fiction, and lay bare the different ways in which our relationship to historical moments mediates, and is mediated by, the cultural environment we inhabit today.
The exhibition included paintings alongside photographic, film and video works. Rear View Mirror also included the UK premiere of works by Siemon Allen, Tacita Dean, Joachim Koester, Vesna Pavlovic, Omer Fast, Delia Brown, and Matthew Buckingham.
Artists in full: Siemon Allen, Matthew Buckingham, Delia Brown, Giovanna Maria Casetta, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Omer Fast, Joachim Koester, Mark Lewis, Vesna Pavlovic, Silke Schatz, Elisabeth Subrin, Mark Titchner.
The exhibition is devised and selected by Elizabeth Fisher, Exhibitions Organiser at Kettle’s Yard.
