2018.
Installation. Sound, projection, objects
How many generations does it take for a person’s memory to fade completely; how long can memory be salvaged through our objects?
Mária Wendt obtained her certificate from the Hungarian Royal School of Model Drawing and Teacher Training in 1920. I, as her great-grandchild, earned an MA degree in 2015 from the same institution – now the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In the meantime, along with the turns of Hungarian history, our family too has undergone significant changes. As a result of the loss of territories, our family was torn apart, and after living in hiding, it lost all its wealth and social status. But, after two generations, there is an artist in the family once again – though I have never met my great-grandmother.
As of the 1910s, my great-grandmother recorded her experiences in photographs, which she then arranged into photo albums. These documents, as records of historical periods, point from private life events to collective happenings. I have only partial knowledge of the events captured by the photos; they have mostly been forgotten for all eternity. My grandmother, in the role of the mediator, speaks about the narrower and broader events that weave through the story of our family by looking at these photos and objects that have been salvaged. It is at this point that history becomes enmeshed in the tangles of personal memory.
In the installation, I use a few family objects – or relics from the “Granny Museum”, as my grandmother likes to refer to them – and personal stories to reconstruct faded memories, that can now only be partially pieced together.