Arc of Memory

The exhibition “Arc of Memory” presents the works of six artists represented by Zanahorian & Van Espen Gallery. It is the first exhibition held in the new exhibition space opened in Prague by the gallery, which was established in 2011 in Bratislava. The exhibition aims to present to the Czech public a layered overview of artists’ works rich in both media used and ways of expression in general while giving the presented whole an organic unity. The six artists chosen out of the thirteen gallery’s resident artists come from the younger generation born between 1979-1985.

The subtle connecting thread that runs through the presented works is the interest in the topics of history, memory and remembering which are dealt with in various perspectives ranging from the categories of the universal and the public to the personal and the intimate. These themes manifest themselves naturally in the work of the artists, whether they are addressing them explicitly or in a subliminal manner. One can indeed speculate about the generational and thematic commonality between the artists.

The artists’ interests in history and the preservation/loss of memory, even though variously motivated and represented, come together (among others) in their dealing with motives of transience, destruction and death. They remind us of the frailty of all values, power structures, cultures and our own lives. Memory doesn’t exist without time and time fundamentally means disintegration. The arc of memory thus spans from an event to its forgetting and one of the possible goals of Art is precisely to resist such forgetting.