Echoes in Memory Tonight in Helsinki
Esther Shalev-Gerz
International artist and professor in the MA fine art at Valand Academy University of Gothenburg
The Night of Philosophy, Helsinki Festival 2017
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, September 1, 10pm-7am
Esther Shalev-Gerz's two-channel HD video projection from her installation Echoes in Memory, 2007 will be displayed tonight during the Night of Philosophy, and as a part of the Helsinki Festival 2017.
In this double video, Shalev-Gerz filmed members of the staff of London’s National Maritime Museum listening to her in the Great Hall of the Queen’s House as she recounts what the person she filmed before just told her. Those fragments of history, dreams and interpretations range from actual facts to long-held rumours and disputed opinions. In the background, one can see visitors coming and going and mysterious virtual feminine characters.
Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi previously adorned the ceiling of the Great Hall with a fresco: the Allegory of Peace and the Arts. The painting, removed for political reasons, showed the female figure of Peace surrounded by 23 other women representing arts, sciences or concepts, such as Music, Astronomy, Victory, Arithmetic or Reason.
Using images from across their lives, Shalev-Gerz created 3D portraits of 24 women she recognizes as inspirations in her life and practice. Dialoguing with Gentileschi’s anonymous allegories figures, 24 computer-generated sculptures appear intermittently in the video. They are artists, writers and figures from popular culture or intimate friends: Artemisia Gentileschi, Capradesse Germaine, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Stefanie Baumann, Ayelet Shalev, Lea Gilinsky, Hannah Arendt, Lisa Le Feuvre, Claude Cahun, Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Marcia Tucker, Julia Kristeva, Alice Liddell, Astrid Lindgren, Meret Oppenheim, Susan Sontag, Agnes Martin, Marcel Duchamp – Rrose Sélavy, Laurie Anderson, Eva Hesse, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and Hélène Cixous.
In Echoes in Memory, history operates as a continuous line of contingencies communicated by multiple narrators. Just like memory, history is personal, political, collective, fragmented, and always influenced by the present.