Angela Washko, “Womanhouse (Or: How To Be A VirtuousWoman)” (2014) from the series ‘Free Will Mode’ (all images courtesy of bitforms gallery)
“I turned the computer on and began to write — all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory,” writes the author dubbed Elena Ferrante in her book My Brilliant Friend. This is how the narrator begins her four-part story about a lifelong friendship: with the fascinating concept of dumping out all of one’s memory. Is it possible? The group exhibition Memory Burn at bitforms gallery, curated by Chris Romero, explores the devices we use to record our lives as we confront mortality and death, and reveals the moments we document to be greatly different from those we just remember, for reasons we cannot control.
Like a distant memory, the work in this show is beautifully curated but not always the easiest to connect with. At the entrance of this Lower East Side gallery, which boasts lovely floor-to-ceiling windows, viewers encounter Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s piece “Level of Confidence” (2015) about the mass kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The viewer stands in front of a yearbook-like collection of photographs of the students, and steps onto two footprints that recall the moment before going through an airport metal detector. After that, a facial recognition detector scans the viewer’s face, attempting to match his or her facial features with one of the missing students.
Read the full review here: http://hyperallergic.com/224676/inhabiting-other-peoples-recorded-memories/
