Untold Stories

Family albums are memory holders where the photos are used to preserve memories. Memories age together with people and code their existence through the cipher of their beliefs, meanings and emotions. When the owner of memories is gone, the cipher is lost and memories become unknowable. But in fact unknowable means omni-knowable as at this point every possible cipher can be used and there is innumerable number of meanings that can be attributed to the photos. And while the front side of the photos is more or less fixed by concrete though unknown images, the back side is open for unlimited interpretations. The series use appropriated photos from family albums torn apart and thrown away, possibly outliving their owners. The photos have been found at flea markets, in antique shops or even in garbage bins, and have been used as a medium to explore the perspective of memory drawn in unconventional way - not from the actual pictures but from the looks on their back side, scanned or photographed, and then digitally processed. Formed by the touch of glue, human hands and cardboard fabric, aged with time, torn, stained, creased, smashed, mixed with dirt, hair, threads, and small particles, the back side surfaces portray nonobjective images which resemble abstract expressionist paintings. Their unidentifiable and indistinct nature unleashes imagination and allows the viewers to apply their own cipher, and to convey stories of memory that have never been told before. Stories of love and hate, of pleasure and sorrow, of mundane and extraordinary moments, equally embodied in the transcendent looks of the photos backside. Building on the elusive nature of memory and its capacity to have varying manifestations in different peoples’ minds but also within the same person’s mind at different time instants, the series reconstruct the deconstructed memory holders in a new context left open to the spectators to invent narratives according to their own beliefs and mindset.