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This You Must Remember
08/11/2022 @ 18:00 - 07/01/2023 @ 18:00
Opening: November 8, Tuesday, 18:00
This You Must Remember is a multi-media exhibition featuring a major new film installation by British filmmaker Sam Jury with composer Rob Godman and poetic works by Abkhazia-based Anton Ochirov, co-produced with SKLAD Cultural Space and Asida Butba.
This You Must Remember explores notions of suspended trauma and the slow violence of prolonged aftermath in post conflict Abkhazia, a de facto state in stasis since the Georgian-Abkhaz war (92/3). The external image of Abkhazia is most often reflected through the ruins and detritus of war that scar its cities and landscape. The film creates a counter narrative, drawing from the personal recollections of those who remain, who knew those ruins as homes and schools, as places of work and enjoyed places of leisure. What emerges is an alternative form of documentary exploring notions of fragmented memory and psychological truth – a close-looking narrative that unfurls the traumatic process of ruination and the notion that any society’s stability is an enduring condition.
Ochirov‘s text takes the form of book pages, made object-like atop of lightbox plinths. Written as both standalone texts and poetic responses to Jury‘s filmed observations, Ochirov‘s work also observes the everyday, drawn from ordinary conversations of modern Abkhazia. In this orchestration, the visuals and poems hold no prescribed reading, but coincide at points unique to each viewer’s perspective and moment of encounter.
Our global space is riddled with hidden conflict zones – zones of traumatic experience. As asynchronous waves of information flow through mass media and digital channels, and collide with our lived experiences of the physical world, an uncertain and fragmented reality is created. In This You Must Remember, both Anton Ochirov and Sam Jury draw from these conflicting states, evoking universal emotions to form the basis of their work.
Image: Still from “This You Must Remember” (2022), multi-channel film installation with sound by Rob Godman, colour, 38’36”
With support from the Arts Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire, UK
