Amnesia · 1990
2 monitors · 1 modified video camera · 4:3 b/w video, no sound, 4:12 min · 1 video player
at: Galerie Jedermann-Harth, Frankfurt/M, DE
at: Galerie Jedermann-Harth, Frankfurt/M, DE
It withdraws quietly. Images loosen from their origins, names lose their voices, and what once seemed certain begins to dissolve into an unfamiliar distance. What remains are fragments—isolated flashes of light searching for a place to return.
Amnesia unfolds within this fragile territory between remembering and forgetting.
At the heart of the installation, a modified video camera projects fleeting fragments of light—fragments of memory — onto a monitor turned upward toward the ceiling. Its screen remains black. The images never settle. They appear only as an attempt, as if memory itself were searching for a surface on which it might once again become visible.
The camera does not record. It recalls.
Its light reaches toward an absence.
Facing away from this silent gesture stands a second monitor. Here, images of the past continue to exist. They have not vanished; they endure within the closed circuit of the videotape. Yet they remain turned away from the place where remembering is taking place. Past and recollection no longer coincide.
Between the two monitors lies an invisible distance.
One preserves what has been. The other searches for what can no longer be recovered. Between them unfolds the uncertain space in which memory hesitates — where recognition flickers for an instant before fading once again into darkness.
The installation does not portray memory as an archive, but as a living process. Remembering is not the retrieval of intact images. It is an act of searching, of approaching, of losing and finding again. Every recollection alters what it seeks to preserve.
Perhaps forgetting is not the disappearance of memory.
Perhaps it is only the moment when memory no longer knows where to find its own images.
Amnesia inhabits this threshold. Light continues to search. The images continue to exist. Yet the path between them has become uncertain.