Mnemosyne – Traversing Boundaries on Meandering Routes of Memory
Mnemosyne and the Digital Giants
Internationally acclaimed photographer and video artist Iris Brosch weaves her feminist concept into deeply intriguing images to explore possible fields of action, play and utopia. Within the framework of “Tableaux Vivants” Iris Brosch employs a comprehensive metaphorical language, borrowed from Greek myths and their transformed versions throughout the history of literature and the arts. Inspired by historic paintings, the viewer is immediately drawn into a riveting narrative and deeply intriguing images, motivated by literature, art, and history. She suggests seemingly playful Renaissance and Baroque references by incorporating a broad spectrum of metaphors, symbols, and allegorical gestures.
Iris Brosch is one of the first artists who produced performances at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Since then, she has depicted the relationship between feminism and ecology, the mystical connection between woman and nature, and shared histories of oppression based on her concept of Eco-Feminism. With delicate body language, opulent staging and sensitive scanning of the female body’s surface, Brosch encourages female empowerment and self-acceptance by proposing the female body as a tool to overcome fear. With Divinita – Birth of Black Venus at the Centro Italiano per le Arti e la Cultura, 51st Venice Art Biennale (2005), Woman and Nature Near Extinction (2013), Metamophoses de L’amour (2017), or even earlier, In Paradisum (2003), the artist references elementary sources of human and non-human life where women emerge from the waters and canals of Venice.
In her 2019 production Inside Gaia, Brosch’s take on the 58th Venice Art Biennale theme May You Live in Interesting Times suggests the urgency of environmental, political, and social instability. However, she radically goes further into experimental explorations to find Gaia, not as a deity from deep times, but as an entity that relates to our times of crisis where Earth and all human and non-humans are at risk.
For the Mnemosyne project Iris Brosch created a video Mnemosyne and the Digital Giants from her studio in Paris, while in isolation due to the pandemic. Within the past months, she captured with seismographic sensitivity Mnemosyne-related phenomena as an alternative draft to the social void defined by confusion and fear. In Mnemosyne and the Digital Giants, the futuristic googles of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) lead into the third millennia with future memories as stored data, which she believes is going to control our minds’ memory. However, without a connection to Mnemosyne, who is the womb of knowledge and creativity, there is no future humanity. Iris Brosch sends a visionary message from the future into our present as a reminder of how we are at risk to become a function of the media and of market data.
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