MEMORY AS A CENTRAL THEME

At the Skissernas Museum (The Museum of Sketches for Public Art) of Sweden opens today, October 4, a collective exhibition dedicated to memory. Based on the works of a diversity of artists, including Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer, Memory Matters emphasizes the importance of collective memory in societies.

Memorial, installation view, 2009. Ph: Alexander Gray Associates

Curated by Patrick Amsellem, Memory Matters emerges from tragic events in the state of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August last year when a far-right group opposed the city's decision to remove a monument to Commander Robert E. Lee (key figure for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War).

The curatorial project behind the exhibition aims to address historiography and commemorative culture in various ways through multidisciplinary works of the last decade. In this way, each work establishes a dialogue with the different contemporary social and political circumstances within the contexts in which the artists work. It is precisely there where it fits the work Memorial, by Luis Camnitzer, produced after the silence after the dictatorship in Uruguay.

Likewise, other works are characterized by the creation of new narrative forms that question previously accepted historical conventions, and that have contributed to the formation of collective memories.