Constructed Memory

Memory is not a passive repository. It is an act: it is constructed, assembled, framed. The images we believe we possess — a frame from a film, a family slide — are not memories but raw materials, reworked and transformed by every gaze.

This is the insight from which Constructed Memory sets out, an exhibition that brings the work of Martina Sauter and Morgaine Schäfer into dialogue. Both trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf — Sauter as Meisterschülerin of Thomas Ruff, Schäfer as Meisterschülerin of Christopher Williams — and the two artists share a radical approach to photography: for both, making an image means remaking an image that already exists, withdrawing it from a flow — cinematic or familial — and returning it as a new object of meaning.

Martina Sauter works with cinema. From the films of Hitchcock and Lynch and from film noir she chooses not the climaxes but the moments of transition — a corridor before someone enters, a window before something happens — extracting them from the flow of twenty-four frames per second. She combines them in collages with scenes constructed in the studio, merging the film still with invention, quotation with present matter. As she has put it, she looks for «a moment of transition between scenes: the moment when it is clear that something is about to happen or has just happened». Her composite images do not document: they build a visual memory that belongs to no film in particular, but to a collective imagination of cinema.

Morgaine Schäfer starts from a private archive: hundreds of slides taken by her father in the 1970s and 1980s, portraying her mother and the family between Poland and Germany. She neither restores nor preserves them: she reopens them. She photographs them while holding them in her hand, projects them, enlarges them and assembles them into sequences that no longer belong to the original album. Hers is the gesture of a second viewing — a looking again that becomes a reconstruction. In her series BWS and magnify BWS, the hand holding the slide and the frame of the smartphone become devices of a new gaze, questioning the relationship between visual inheritance, migration and identity.

What unites Sauter and Schäfer is not a shared aesthetic — the images of the one are nocturnal, cinematic, atmospheric; those of the other domestic, luminous, tactile. It is rather a method: both start from images they did not take — a frame from a film, a slide by a father — and transform them into works that are no longer documents of the past but constructions of a possible memory. A memory that is not inherited but made, piece by piece, like a montage.

Constructed Memory is not an exhibition about nostalgia. It is an exhibition about how images go on signifying long after they were made — and about how, by looking at them long enough, something new can be built.

Martina Sauter (Düsseldorf, 1972) is a photographer and visual artist. A Meisterschülerin of Thomas Ruff at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, she investigates the border between cinema and photography through collage, montage and installation.

Morgaine Schäfer (Wolfsburg, 1986) is a photographer and visual artist. A Meisterschülerin of Christopher Williams at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, she works with family archives, analogue photography and installation to explore identity, migration and memory.