The title of the exhibition is borrowed from W. B. Yeats idea of a reservoir of souls and images that functions meeting point between the living and the dead. Humans would have access to the great memory through dreamlife, either by dreaming or by inducing oneself into a hypnagogic state to listen to voices of the dead, who would share their wisdom, as well as giving advice about everyday life actions.
The great memory could be viewed as a metaphor or symbol for our relation to history; a constructed “space” where temporality is collapsed, and the private merges with the collective.
The installation at Flip Project space consists of a large number of cut out embroidery fragments. The textiles are bought at secondhand shops in southern Sweden, most often charity shops, in the province of Småland, where Bärtås grew up. Traditionally this was a poor area, an area for hard rural work, but during and after modernity it became an area of innovation (IKEA stems from this area).
In his family most of the embroidery was made for local charity auctions arranged by the church.
Now, in the postindustrial society, these embroideries have their second circulation of charity.
Utilizing various stitching techniques they represent flowers, plants, humans, animals, objects, and buildings—a collective memory of folkloristic imagery. The handicraft techniques that underpin these image worlds belong to slowness, to the private sphere, but could also be seen to express encapsulated time and creative power.
The parts originate from an antiquated, idealized imagery, and at the same time embroidery is a forerunner of the digital image’s pixel structure. It is a realm of images that is associated with farmer’s words of wisdom, with moralities (in word and image), which have essentially developed out of fear and—as He see it—is related to incantation.
The anonymous creators of these object-images—which spans from a period of almost hundred years—are all most probably dead, and the handling of object-images has a necromantic meaning to the artist.
“The great memory” belongs to a series of works (films, installations, assemblages) with necromancy as artistic and historiographic methodology (some of them together with Swedish/ Iranian artist Behzad Khosravi Noori).
at Flip Project, Naples
until January 14, 2024