marianne csaky

 

 

Light boxes (Summer series, Winter series, Garden series and Garden, 2007-2008) are based on old photo-negatives taken by my grandfather when I was 8 months to 4 years old. He was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. I inherited his collection of some 2,500 glass-negatives and film-negatives. He made a special case for the negatives. He kept a diary of the most important facts: the date, the place and the information of the exposures. From my early childhood this collection of negatives represented for me the inarticulated past, the documentation of unquestionnable truth before interpretation or narrative reorganization - which, of course, was a false view because the act of taking a photograph is interpretation in itself. Nevertheless, to me, my manipulation of these negatives meant changing the past. An illusion that I rewrite history but not only in the phase of interpretation but also in the realm of the inarticulate mass of events. Thechnically it meant that I made a copy of these negatives in their original size, 6cm by 9cm. Then I took colour shots of myself and took my figures from colour negatives and put them on the original black and withe negatives. As a result, I show up on each of these negatives twice, in two different ages. I built an installation for each of these film negatives by placing a mirror behind each negative in a 45-degree position. This provides sufficient light for making the scene on the negative visible. This work is a documentation of the painful efforts of memory and postmemory work leading to rewriting our past in order to change our present.
Time Leap, Light boxes,
VideoSpace Gallery, 2007