re

EDITION

2021

school

National Institute of Design
Gandhinagar, India

Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain and subsequently, recall information. It is a diverse collection of an independent system that pulls together information through the senses. It also serves to remember and recreate an object or an event. It takes us into the environing world as well as into our individual lives. Yet itself is very selective and has a tendency to rework the original facts of an event or experience in a way that coheres around the wishes and values of the person remembering. It is both a form of knowledge and an agent of imagination. They are neither completely real nor fiction. The more we recollect them, the more details we add to them or delete from them, by repeatedly editing through ever-changing context and perspective. Think of memory as any other medium, you end up with more noise every time you use it. For Freud, there was no such thing as memory loss. The mind is like the wax surface of a mystic writing pad upon which, that which is experienced or learned is inscribed, leaving an imprint below the surface, which may become more and more deeply buried, but is never completely effaced. (a note on the mystic writing pad, 1925) Although there are many moments of misremembering and of not successfully recollecting, there are few moments in which we are not immersed in memory. And this immersion includes each step we take, each thought we think, each word we utter. Every cell of our brains holds memories. My work shift from literal renderings of the past to suggestive of the past, tapping into the reservoir of emotion as much as into a store of cognitive knowledge, more to do with the nature of memory, evading, and forgetting. To acknowledge the massive presence of memory is to acknowledge how important remembering is. Through this project, I have tried to stage the unreliability of memory, capture its essence and its construction-deconstruction. I was exploring mediums such as photography, sculpture, stop-motion, and interactive code. A part of the project seeks the active engagement of the audience whereas the other is for visual engagement and reflection. Lastly, the animation work aims to express fragmented yet unified experiences. Materiality and texture of form constitute primarily the expressive part. As I come to accept the ever-changing truth and ever-shifting memory with no definite answer to it, this project is my inquiry into the nature of memory. I am questioning issues that are fundamental to memory through Art, conducting my research on these topics in the light of philosophy and visual communication.