Waldemar Tatarczuk: UP (PL)

Photo: Waldemar Tatarczuk

Saturday, August 27th 8.00 – 8.20 pm
Foyer of the Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana 

Collective memory resides in two big narratives: history and mythology. With both of these, though – just as our own personal memories – we have abandoned the battle for objectivity, for the one truth, a single shared understanding. What about personal memories, then, and their relation to the collective?

Memory remains an enigma; despite the fact science is gradually deciphering its laws and procedures. It stays a mysterious process in which information imprinted in us during consciousness is transformed into cerebral databases and, even more interestingly, woven into our personal stories. Perhaps, memory in some sense functions exactly like the strategies of art creation.

Waldemar Tatarczuk is a Polish artist currently residing in Lublin. He creates performances and installations, is an art curator, was the founder of the Performance Art Centre in Lublin, and is currently the director of the Labyrinth Gallery (Galeria Labirynt). “The essential substance of my performances is memory. Memory as a phenomenon as well as memory embedded in material objects, traces, that which remains. Memory that refers to the past while contradicting the future. The question of traces that remain, of where they are actually written, refers to what is left after every event as well. It refers to memory and how it evolves, how memories become deformed and blurred, replaced by other, more vivid ones.”