Contemporary Artworks as Platform of Memory. From Analogue Resources of Memory to Digital Art Display: Walid Raad. (original) (raw)

Title: Contemporary Artworks as Platform of Memory. From Analogue Resources of Memory to Digital Art Display: Walid Raad. Conference: Changing Platforms of Memory Practices. Technologies, User Generations and Amateur Media Dispositives. Faculty of Arts, History department, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. September 2015. Abstract: This paper is situated in the context of Contemporary Art practice and its links with cultural memory. In it I will explain how Contemporary Art has become a medium within which to hold current discussions and debates about memory, paying particular attention to the changes in platforms of memory and how they resonate with artistic practice. Traditional storage mediums of memory, for example analogue amateur photograph and home video, have become important resources for contemporary artists working with memory. Such approaches can be used to revise or reassert historical events, epochs of social change and the way in which people record and pass on their memories. This process often involves the digitisation of analogue mediums and results in final artworks comprising videos, photographs, video installations, images projections or online archives. This paper will explore the work of Tacita Dean, Kristov Wodizcko and Shimon Attie, predominantly focusing on those of Walid Raad, in particular his online archive of photographs, videos and artworks which merge old and new ways of recording, retrieving and broadcasting memory from the private realm to the public life. Raad’s work confronts the atrocities of the recent Lebanese conflict. Although his exhibitions feature present his work in different disciplines, together online they constitute one virtual archive. The action of curating and online archive of work creates a reflexive space for the contemplation on how history is constructed, with the archive’s artwork commonality being human affect and the capturing of everyday events. In the case of the Lebanese conflict, this is recorded in notebooks, oral testimony, amateur photography and home videos. Due to this, the archive is situated in both the private and the public, occupying a liminal space as every piece of the project has been created from fragments of personal archives that, eventually, become public the moment they are uploaded. The contrast between analogue and digital platforms of memory in contemporary artworks make the viewer be aware of the ever evolving ways in which we record and document our everyday life, as well as the huge impact that the digital and the virtual have on it.