WE ARE WHAT WE REMEMBER
and what we forget 22.-30.3.2025
Portraits
When moving into our new home in 2020, I looked for a place for an old plaster sculpture depicting me. The me in the sculpture was five years old, sculpted by my mother in 1978. I sat for a moment with the heavy sculpture on my lap, considering a windowsill as a possible place. I held my arms firmly around the plaster version of my head not to drop it. Underneath my hands I felt the shapes molded by my mother's hands; the bumps and indentations of cheeks, eyes, nose, and lips. Suddenly I was immersed in reverie, imagining the gestures of my mother's fingertips and her observational decisions that guided her in shaping the likeness of my features. Who was that five year old me, do I remember? And who was that five year old daughter inside my mother’s mind? Decades later the weight of the plaster head seemed to encapsulate the weight of all those lived years, hidden within the features of a child. The plaster head is hard and solid, but within the heads of us living beings a space of intimate infinity resides – as referred to by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his description of a state of rêverie. In each of our own intimate infinities is a free world of memories, imagination and fleeting thoughts.
Our inner understanding of ourselves and others is in a constant state of change. Countless outgrown versions recede into deeper layers of memory, making way for more updated ones. We all have vast number of ‘portraits’ in the archives of our memories of people we've known closely or encountered more briefly. Portraits that are not constructed merely of physical appearances but also of our perception of character and possible lives imagined too. Updated by new encounters and experiences. These inner portraits may be entirely different from the reality of their subjects. In other people’s minds there are also different versions of us. On our planet there are 8.2 billion human minds, remembering, interpreting, imagining, and thinking of each other. How many versions of each other may there possibly exist inside all these minds?
The Beholder's Share
Art historians Alois Riegl and Ernst Gombrich made famous the concept of the beholder's share, describing the dynamic interaction between an artwork and viewer, where the viewer's individual inner world of experience plays a significant role in the interpretation. According to neuroscience and memory research, this process is not limited to art; it reflects a fundamental way in which we perceive and interpret all aspects of reality.
The information our senses transmit to our brains are only parts of the observed object; our brains create an interpretation of the rest based on our stored experiential memory. Neuroscientist Anil Seth describes this brain process as a prediction machine, the brain's continuous ‘best guesses.’ The brain’s interpretation of reality is an active process of constructing, not a passive receiving of reality as it is. Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath describes memories as impressionistic paintings. Each created memory is an impression of what happened, constructed by the brain. Memory is an unreliable store of information, but a purposefully creative and flexible way of processing information to help us survive in a constantly changing environment and a changing self. Each time a memory is retrieved, it is slightly different. New experiences and our varying emotional states transform the emphasis of details, emotions and perspectives associated with a memory. Emotional states influence both the creation and the recollection of a memory.
The exhibition WE ARE WHAT WE REMEMBER – and what we forget features works that create various situations in which one can contemplate the multiple ways of imagining another’s memories. Viva Granlund's inner stream of imagery drawn on hundreds of pieces. Simo Mantere's paintings where many actions of the work take place outside the painting, and the remaining traces act as enigmatic marks. The rest is up to our imagination. Terhi Vuotto’s mysterious series of portraits of a fictional family, the Ryynänens, created from her unconsciously remembered faces. In Marjo Levlin's video work, two artists, performance artist Inari Virmakoski and composer-performer Mercedes Krapovickas, get to know each other through a dialogue of expressive gestures. Krapovickas composed the music for the video filmed earlier in Majakka, where the exhibition takes place.
Text: Iina Kuusimäki
