In rummet [format] Kirsti Taylor Bye and Erik Betshammar shows the exhibition Acting Together (though neither of them separately), an installation that processes the photograph in relation to the memory. Their joint installation will show the moments where time has stopped and has been burned into a material and the memories we could never have (and that has never existed together).
» It’s this thing about the memory. I remember having seen a photograph from a family get-together when I was merely a couple of months old. And I remember seeing the photograph and being sure I could remember how it smelled and how the dress tightened around a body that was only in the process of getting to know itself.
On another photograph I see myself, over half a century earlier, only that it is not me, it is my grandmother. »
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthers write about finding his own mother on photograph from the time before he was born, after she had died. It’s a photograph he has never before seen and has no way of being able to remember. Nonetheless this was the true image of his mother. In the same way we find ourselves – before we are born, before our parents are born – on a piece of paper with traces of light in the form of silver that has oxidized and been burned onto the surface. In one moment nothing and everything has happened. We have been born, grown up, given birth, grown old and died. We whirl around the universe and are always and never in the same place. We laugh, dance, eat, hit, scream, cry, run, sleep. And sometimes it stops, we take out the camera and burn in the moment.
» It’s this thing about the memory. I know that the first time I took a photograph I borrowed my father’s camera. He allowed me to take a picture, and much time later I got the picture in my hand. I remember the feeling of the image being far more magical than the moment of taking it.
And it’s not until long after I realise the circular motion: we were by one of the largest silver mines.»
We whirl into each other’s hands. And suddenly we have never been alone. We have always been. We will always be.
Kirsti Taylor Bye (born 1985 in Trondheim) is a photographer and artist. She has a MFA in photography from the University of Photography (one year before Erik), and most recently displayed the installation Som en skog i Skogen (Like a forest in the Forest) at Skogen in Gothenburg, October-Novemeber 2013. More information at: http://www.okbye.se
Erik Betshammar (born 1985 in Trondheim) is a photographer and artist. He has a MFA in photography from the University of Photography, University of Gothenburg from 2012. Earlier this year he displayed his solo exhibition Även titeln är väldigt viktig för bilden (Even the title is very important for the picture) at Galleri Mors Mössa in Gothenburg. More information at: http://www.betshammar.se
Together the two released the book ettersom / eftersom, spring 2012.
http://www.erikirsti.com