Press release

Erinnerungsinseln

Valerie Habsburg, Anna Bochkova

Pragovka Gallery

The exhibition will be open 29.6.–23.7. 2020. Curator of the exhibition is Lucie Nováčková.

The duo project of visual artists Valerie Habsburg and Anna Bochkova was born on the boarders of themes which are important for both artists, through creating bridges and island of separated past and building them into the shared present. Despite coming from different artistic backgrounds both artists are tend to work spatially, creating phantoms of abandoned past and questioning its connection with future.

Erinnerungsinseln translates from German as memory islands; this term is used in neuroscience to describe individual, mostly indistinct memories that remain from a period of amnesia or twilight state. Can amnesia be seen in a sense of a common history as a conscious decision to consign some events to oblivion in sake of avoiding inescapable traumata?

The authors perceive space as a carrier of memory. Both of them try to fight their private, amazing and painful, lost memories by depicting, physically materializing them and letting them exist in the conceptual archive.