Symphony - The Mnemosyne Revolution2016

What happens when historical events float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings?
Image: Visitor's inside Symphony-Mnemosyne Revolution,2016 - in front of Allan McCollum Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates 1982 (cast and painted in 1984).
Symphony - The Mnemosyne Revolution is exhibited as part of An Imagined Museum, which conjures up a fictional situation in which the works of art on display are about to disappear. By familiarising themselves with pieces by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois and Isa Genzken, members of the public are invited to preserve them in their memory and create their own ‘imagined museum’. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration with the Tate Liverpool and MMK Frankfurt.
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An Imagined Museum, 2016-17
Responding to the curatorial vision of its host, this new commission of Symphony proposes a future condition in which humans, immersed by digital technology, are prompted to relearn how to create meaning out of sense experience and emotion. This artwork is not a singular thing. Symphony consists of the potential sensory exchange between two museum visitors. Being moved by instructions from headphones, visitors are trained to internalise their memories of the exhibition and to observe induced, yet felt, body sensations in the process of experiencing art. www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/en/symphony-mnemosyne-revolution

"The way memory works: memories are not encapsulated images that we pick up every time we remember something; a memory is generated at the very moment it is called, and it is never exactly the same. What effect could this have on artworks appropriated from memory? Indeed, a total devaluation of the price of the artwork. A good thing, if you ask me." —

Extract from a work created by Dora García in dialogue with the exhibition An Imagined Museum. Presented like a futuristic journal, it responds to the fictional disaster scenario of the exhibition: what would society look like without artistic expression? What would we lose if art were to disappear? Freely handed over to visitors, The Mnemosyne Revolution journal is like a guide of the exhibition.

Lundahl & Seitl