Three Rooms of KIOKU (34 images)
KIOKU (n): The Japanese word for memory, recall, recollection, or remembrance.
The idea for this installation emerged from my interest in memories in public and private spaces. What is the act of remembering? What are personal/collective memories? And, how do these memories become history?
Today we capture our memories in thousands of digital images and store them in clouds. In stores, in aisle after aisle, one can find all sorts of readymade charms for making memory scrapbooks. Are “outsourcing memories” and “buying nostalgia” forms of forgetting?
This project finds its point of entry in the physical space of “a room.” I have carved out three human-scale rooms within the public space of the city building. They are my rooms, and at the same time they are every room where memories are shared and internalized, where memories and history collide, and where memories meander away from the precise.
In this three-component installation, viewers will encounter three different approaches to the notion of memory. In each room memory is explored in many forms: concocted, assembled, dissected, failed, rebuilt, re-collected, re-imagined, and re-presented.
