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Contemporary Art Archive - Tbilisi

Archive of Academic Writings

2021 Edition of the Project is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth of Georgia

My Silent Response Is Your Blind Guide

Installation

Andro Eradze

print on glass aquarium
2017
52,8x38,4 cm.
Artarea Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia

Collective memory has become something to be used misused and exploited rather than some- thing that sits inertly for each person to posses and contain. Discourse of memory thus becomes a inspiration for artists who want to translate their experiences of memory into photographic images that cultivate mnemonic experience. Defining ones identity is crucially dependent on the memory. Experiences and remembrances of facts from the different stages of one’s life create a base to form the unique, individual identity.

However, the memory we have on certain things is changing every time we are trying to recall it. Our minds are filling in the gaps and with time passing some memories become a lie though following the thread of the truth - something which has never happened. In cases as such, one does not realize that the memories have changed and believe that everything happened in exact same way as they remember.

Occasionally, when memory is not strong enough it is hard to understand if we are dealing with personal experience, story we have heard, parts of our dream, something wrongly interpreted during the very first acquaintance or something unreal - something invented.

In the era of new medias, when we receive information even when we are not mentally prepared for that, keeping memories “clean” is getting harder and harder. The reality we see might be intention- ally or unintentionally modified by someone else and our mind is endangered to understand and store it as something real remembrance dominates as long as memory’s flow is continuous and associations are strong while rediscovery of an image whose content has been forgotten trans- forms photographic experience into the crisis of memory, but somehow their absence is as powerful as their presence in memory, every visible act is an expression of invisible and vise versa.