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Fluid and fragmented, memory is never fixed. It morphs, shapeshifts and reshapes —taking on the tinge of history as it moves through time.
Memory embeds itself not just cognitively, in the mind’s capacity for recall, but also in our bodies and the objects and materials scattered throughout our lives. Memory cannot always be articulated and expressed in language, at times it is accessed through processes and matter where the act of handling a substance becomes a way of sitting with history and sifting through imagined and lived experience.
Bringing together six artists who work across different mediums — Purvai Rai, Karla Nixon, Leila Abrahams, Mille Kalsmose, Amy Rusch and Sahlah Davids—“Collected Memory” reflects on how memory manifests in the material world— whether stitched, woven, tessellated, torn apart, or pieced back together. It engages how memory is intertwined with the textures, colors, strength, weight, density, porosity, opacity and elasticity of materials. Through this sense of materiality, memory resists linearity, instead functioning through scraps, vignettes, collages, assemblages, and echoes that are folded, twisted and circulated.
Through engagement with brass, paper, dyes, stones, crystals, chains, thread, jute, paint, string, pill capsules and plastic—memory finds form in matter. The materials themselves mimic the way memory operates, unfolding through layering and accumulation. Nixon, for instance, meditates on fragmentation and reconstruction. Her paper-based works involve tearing and rearranging, speaking to the instability, chaos and ordered disorder of the human condition. Flowing from ceiling to floor, ‘If I Could Piece Together’, is a cascading installation that oscillates between weight and lightness, structure and dissolution, monument and antiform. Rai’s tactile tapestries, on the other hand, use the language of textiles to reflect histories of religious and cultural discord, drawing on her personal experiences as an artist of Indian heritage. The Moli material, reminiscent of rich pashmina dresses, traces travels and encounters spanning millennia across geographies, while jute, a natural fiber from the Corchorus stem, weaves layers of meaning through its history as a key part of Bengal's economy in the early 20th century. Rai’s tapestries suggest an archaeology of memory, where materials hold traces of familial and intergenerational experience.
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Rusch’s engagement with plastic—an emblem of human time and waste—contrasts with the vast elemental forces she invokes in her images, depicting ocean crossings and microscopic traces of weathering and erosion. Her practice, directly engaging with the forces of time—water, wind and sediment—uses stitching as a gesture to document encounters with histories of matter, creating topographies and strata while mapping the passage of time. ‘The Blue Book Passage works in particular—Trails of Tail Light’, ‘This Has Been Time Travel’, and ‘The Moon Was Thin’, ‘The Night Was Dark’, and ‘There Were Infinite Stars’—emerge from passages Rusch wrote in blue notebooks while sailing. Streams of consciousness of sorts, the works hold memories, an attempt to bring together what is captured in both text and body.
This sense of accumulation resonates with Kalsmose’s expansive practice. For instance, her work ‘Collected Memory (CMT2)’, from which the exhibition draws its title, is made from brass and double-woven paper dyed in teas. Part of a series of sculptural and participatory cabinets, the work incorporates memories written on folded pieces of paper and was conceived as a universal library and a living archive of humanity. For Kalsmose, memory is not just collected—it is shared and shaped by collective experience. For Davids, memory is entwined with lineage and survival. Drawing from her grandparents’ work as tailors and seamstresses in apartheid-era South Africa, she reflects on how material practices can be both acts of resistance and means of sustenance. Working with fabric becomes a way to embody the struggles and resilience of previous generations. There is an intimacy to her work—a sense of the personal made tangible, of small, intricate gestures carrying the weight of history. This is particularly evident in the trinkets (vibrant and jewel-like) that make up her assemblages.
Abrahams’s practice speaks to the power of material not just to represent Histories but its ability to embody personal experiences. Her use of medical objects—gel capsules and blister packs—directly points toward her lived experience with chronic illness. Here, memory is inscribed in routines of care captured through ubiquitous, throw away (but very necessary) items. Her work holds the contradictions that simultaneously confront the fragility of the human body and the resilience found in the everyday acts of survival. She transforms these materials into objects of beauty and resistance.
What connects the artists in this exhibition is not just an interest in memory, but the understanding that remembering is gathered, shared and passed down. Through their practices, they reveal memory as something unfolding in process and material —present in what we touch and assemble—fragile yet enduring.
- Nkgopoleng Moloi
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Collected Memory : THK Cape Town
Past viewing_room
