Conflicting Memories
Exhibition Overview
Saralyn Reece Hardy, curator
Conflicting Memories offers an opportunity to examine how works of art participate in recording our cultural past-a process that often involves conflicts between the histories established by those in power and the alternative histories of those subjected to that power. In The book of laughter and forgetting, author Milan Kundera summed this up elegantly, "The struggle of man against power," he wrote, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting. " Conflicting Memories includes work from the past five centuries, but is primarily dedicated to contemporary art and to the recent notion of cultural memory, a term that describes the essential cultural record that is passed on to succeeding generations through such avenues as ritual, celebration, advertising, consumer items, literature and the arts. Throughout the exhibition, William Kentridge's hand-drawn animated film, "Felix in Exile," will be projected in the gallery.
Conflicting Memories was a collaborative effort of the Salina Art Center and the Spencer Museum of Art.
Works of art
