THE SHAPE OF MEMORY

CRITICAL ANIMALS AS PART OF THIS IS NOT ART

29 SEPTEMBER – 22 OCTOBER 2017

For the full exhibition essay and catalogue click here.

“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”  

 – Rebecca Solnit  

The return to these internal and external spaces or places is what helps us learn, grow and change. It helps us understand a certain part of where we were and where we may be going. THE SHAPE OF MEMORY is a multimedia group exhibition that will examine notions of physical and psychological space, questioning how and why these structures of or into a space can reflect our past, our present and what our future may be.  

Featuring artists Zainab Hikmet, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Elise Harmsen, Mohini Chandra, Dean Cross, Annelies Jahn and Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano. 

Curated by Talia Smith. 

ABOUT TALIA SMITH 

Talia Smith is an artist and curator of Samoan, Cook Island and New Zealand European descent. Originally from New Zealand she is now based in Sydney, Australia. 

Smith’s visual arts practice utilises the mediums of photography and video to examine the emotional and physical traces we leave behind on the landscape, the histories we build and the ruins we leave. While her curatorial practice engages primarily with the photographic medium and its representations. She has exhibited and curated shows at artist run spaces in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and New York with solo shows in both Australia and New Zealand. She was a participant in the 2016 curatorial intensive at 4A Centre for contemporary Asian art and is 2017’s emerging curator at Firstdraft. 

Smith is also the founder and Co-Director of new artist run initiative Cold Cuts, is a board member of Runway and will be competing a residency with Bundanon Trust in August, 2017. 

IMAGE: Zainab Hikmet Half Moon Bay – Auckland glass 2015, glass made from raw Half Moon Bay (Auckland) beach sand; dimensions, 100mm x 100mm x 100mm