Pioneers of the Immemorable

Apex Art

Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Immemorable
curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago

Sept 19 — Nov 3, 2007

Zbynek Baladran, Alejandro Cesarco, Felix Gmelin, Sanja Ivekovic, David Maljkovic, Ahmet Ogut, Katerina Seda, Artur Zmijewski

"Every new telling of a story perfects its narrative but also rearranges, edits and moves it further from its original, authentic plot. What do we remember? How do we remember and retell stories of the past? How do we project them into the future?

In his book of essays, Idea of Prose, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines the concept of the "immemorable" as that which "skips from memory to memory without itself ever coming to mind [and which] is, properly speaking, the unforgettable." This immemorable, or unforgettable, is an unconscious element that infiltrates the conscious memory and creates an involuntary memory. As Agamben further explains, "The memory that brings back to us the thing forgotten is itself forgetful of it and this forgetfulness is its light. It is, however, from this that its burden of longing comes: an elegiac note vibrates so enduringly in the depths of every human memory that, at the limit, a memory that recalls nothing is the strongest memory." Located in the space between remembrance and forgetfulness, the conscious and unconscious, the immemorable brings to mind another concept, that of modernist nostalgia—a future-oriented longing for something that never existed."

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[note: pdf of exhibition brochure available on exhibition Web site.

image from exhibition Apex Web site. Caption: Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, 2002]