C/O Berlin | screen memories – Talents 36 . Verónica Losantos / Anja Schürmann • PiB

From The Series „screen Memories“, 2013–2015 © Verónica Losantos

Solo Exhibition

Talents 36 . screen memories

Verónica Losantos / Anja Schürmann

Opening: Friday, February 5, 2016, 19h
Exhibition: February 6 – April 24, 2016
Guided Tour/Visit with Verónica Losantos: Monday, February 22, 2016, 18:30h

Opening hours: Daily 11-20h
Admission: 10 €, Reduced 6 € (Online Ticket)

Public Guided Tours (held in German): Every Saturday and Sunday 2 pm and 4 pm.
No registration needed. 5 € plus entrance fee.
Guided tours can be booked online along with a ticket here
Please write to tours@co-berlin.org if you want to book a special guided tour for groups.

Overview of all exhibitions & events at C/O Berlin

Description

C/O Berlin will continue the series Talents from 6th February to 24th April 2016.The exhibition, entitled screen memories, will present photographs by
Verónica Losantos and texts by Anja Schürmann. Talents presents young photographers and art critics on the threshold between their education and professional life. The opening will take place on Friday, 5th February 2015 at 7pm at the Amerika Haus in the Hardenbergstraße 22-24.

And a human is called human because he forgets, because he suppresses. And because he enthuses and fortifies, because he warms when telling a story”. Herbert Grönemeyer

Birthdays, visits from relatives, baptisms, first day at school, holiday trips, last day at school – photo albums canonize special family events to collective narratives and visualize individual life stories. They are an affirmation of one’s own origins, important props for memories and breathe new life into long-forgotten incidents. However, what happens when a crucial protagonist is missing from this narrative – one’s own father? How does his absence influence one’s own childhood memories? Can one create the absent photographs of him in retrospect? And can one revive memories through visual reenactment? Verónica Losantos has no photos from the time she shared with her father and the absence of these photographs prompts her to fill the gaps in her memory herself. With her artistic appropriation, reconstruction and association of the past, Verónica Losantos reveals the fleetingness and lack of definition inherent in the act of remembering.

In her series “screen memories” Verónica Losantos stages three kinds of pictures: She photographs memories that she has of the time with her father. Then she produces photos that she knew her father had photographed himself back then or also photos that portray him. Finally, she completely reinvents memories and creates a past that does not exist. She stages and imagines new situations with her father – a conscious simulation or manipulation of the contents of memory. Yet what is true, what is fictive? These three artistic approaches are not specified and are combined in her work in such a way that the viewers are left to decide themselves which kind of memory they are looking at.

Interestingly, the moments and situations that Verónica Losantos simulates are not the classic highlights of a family album but so-called screen memories. According to Sigmund Freud, these “screen memories” are slips of the memory: In memories of childhood that are recapitulated actively, it is not necessarily the “significant” things, but rather the “insignificant” ones that come to mind. Screen memories are triggered by two conflicting forces – one of them attempts to remember the important incident while the other tries to suppress it as a form of protection.

The two forces do not cancel each other out but instead produce a “memory compromise”. It is not the significant incident that becomes the recollected image, but an element that is strongly linked to it associatively, something that could have happened before or after, whose relevance forms a seemingly strong contrast to the emotion-driven memory. The memory is hence to some extent shifted into the association.

Verónica Losantos’ photographs are analogue – hence they have a special colour, a similar aesthetic. The analogue edits are much more raw as there are no pixels but instead grains and scratches. At the same time, there is not always the same sharpness. The imperfection of the texture is inherent to analogue photography. The real prints and the fixation in materiality are a reference to the process of development, the appearance of the photograph. Verónica Losantos not only shows how we remember through the selection, the perspectivity or the arsenal of images but also through the format of her photos, which for her represent different presences within the memory.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, published by Kehrer Verlag:
C/O Berlin Talents 36: Verónica Losantos / Anja Schürmann | screen memories

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Verónica Losantos, born 1984, studied audiovisual communication and media at the University of Burgos and the Lette Verein in Berlin. In 2013 she won the 2nd prize of the Close Up! photography competition held by C/O Berlin. Her works have been exhibited in Freies Museum Berlin, the gallery World in a Room, the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto and in the gallery f5,6 in Munich. She is currently working as a freelance photographer in the field of education at the Society for Humanistic Photography. Verónica Losantos lives in Berlin.

Anja Schürmann, born in 1978, did a PhD in art-historical image descriptions as a scholarship holder of the DFG graduate research training group “Bild-Körper-Medium“ (image-body-medium) at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Since 2009 she has been a research assistant at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and also works as a freelance author –for numerous exhibition catalogues and for HANT – Magazin für Fotografie, among others. Anja Schürmann lives in Düsseldorf.

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Promoting young talents and giving them an initial chance that could shape their future – Talents is a creative campus for young international contemporary photography and art criticism. Since 2006, C/O Berlin has supported emerging photographers and critics on the threshold between their educational and professional life with this exhibition series. Every solo exhibition is accompanied by a publication, in which image and text enter into a dialogue with one another. Talents is an international competition with an annual call for entries. From the submitted entries, a specialist jury selects four photographers for each respective year. With the help of strong partnerships, C/O Berlin then sends the photographers and art critics out into the world. This programme, unique in Europe, provides many young artists with their first exhibition opportunity, for example in the Goethe Institutes of Minsk, Paris, Mexico City or Santiago de Chile.