MALLEABLE MEMORY

curated by
Nitin Mukul

AICON GALLERY, New York
22 July – 11 September 2010

Featuring works by Jaishri Abichandani, Eric Ayotte, Shelly Bahl, Ruby Chishti, Mike Estabrook, Chitra Ganesh,Gisela Insuaste, Mala Iqbal, John Jurayj, Jen Liu, Naeem Mohaiemen, Sandeep Mukherjee, Nitin Mukul, Anjali Srinivasan, and Jaret Vadera

Aicon Gallery New York is delighted to present MALLEABLE MEMORY, a group exhibition featuring selected work from a host of international artists. The artists featured in this exhibition ask us to embrace our inherently subjective interpretations of both personal and collective histories through the evolving and illusive device of memory and the complicated ways such informs our understanding of ourselves, our pasts and our futures.

Curator's note:
Truth is elusive, motivated by self-preservation. In the film Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa, various eyewitnesses describe their recollections of a violent crime. The accounts and their outcomes vary, leaving viewers to weigh each version against another. In the process the characters' stories collectively show the nature of truth as unstable and always susceptible to being shaped. Indeed, we have built-in survival mechanisms that may lead us to selectively edit or even invent memories to forge 'objectivity.' Besides showing the often self-centered nature of people, the film suggests a multitude of perspectives is necessary, objectivity impossible.In a similar spirit, this show calls upon a diverse range of artists and media. Taken together, they reveal a variety of positions, a multiplicity of voices drawing upon their own memories, expressing their own truths. Each has a kind of accuracy, yet are often at odds with grand narratives and official accounts, undercutting neatly kept categories and borders. Through the various mediums, these artists examine the conceptions and expectations of reality each with their own unique interpretation. They present to us the idea of memory as a continuous and multifaceted representation in a constant state of flux. What emerges is a kind of objectivity that rests less upon tangible reference points, but rather associative recollections. Whether appropriated and reconfigured from popular sources, or registered as pigment on a surface, works in this show explore the crafting of reality, and how memory serves us.

Photo Credit: Aicon Gallery, New York

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