Performance developed for Tender Territories, group exhibition by the Borderland Residencies program 2025/26, curated by Miriam Hausner and Nathalie Schulz, with support from Lene ter Haar.
📍 Areal Böhler, Building 43, Düsseldorf
🗓 Thu. 16/4/2026, 6-8pm – Sat. 18/4, 5-7pm – Sun. 19/4, 5-7pm
Washing Memories – Liquid Archive is a long durational performance that deepens my engagement with autobiography as artistic material. Drawing from my personal photo archives spanning several decades, I create a slideshow in which images appear in random succession, interrupted by temporal and spatial jumps. The photographs are projected into water held between my hands, rendering them blurred, unstable and almost unrecognisable. As the images dissolve, I will narrate what the photographs depict — or what I believe they depict — allowing memory, speculation and fiction to intertwine.
Through this process, the personal archive becomes abstracted and gradually de-substantiated, unfolding as a subtle borderland between image and disappearance, private recollection and collective narration. In an era of compulsive image accumulation and visual overstimulation, the photographs recede into liquidity and disappearance, while the spoken voice remains as a shared, collective space.The order of both images and narration is left to chance, generating an open structure in which autobiographical fragments transform into a public narrative. The work questions the status of documentation and self-representation: What is a personal archive? How individual or collective is memory? What remains of an image when it dissolves? Is lived reality less ephemeral than recollection? Can memory become present — and can others inhabit someone else’s memories?
