The Imprint of Memory
Where Traces Take Form
What happens when we remember? Where does memory live? In the mind, in the body, in a landscape, in an image, or perhaps in something we cannot quite name? Within Personal Structures — Confluences, artists from across the world explore the many ways experience can take form. Among the recurring themes of the exhibition, memory is perhaps one of the most elusive. We recognise it, carry it and sometimes try to reconstruct it, yet it is never entirely still. It changes as we change.
At Palazzo Mora, three artists offer three different ways of entering this territory.
Angus Nivison, Big Seas, A Memory, represented by Walcha Gallery and Utopia Art Sydney
The journey begins on the first floor with Australian artist Angus Nivison and Big Seas, A Memory, a triptych represented by Walcha Gallery and Utopia Art Sydney. We first encounter a storm: sea, movement, energy. But the painting begins somewhere else, in memory and loss. Nivison created the work while reflecting on friends who had passed away and on the experience of endings. He often walks along the beach during storms, finding in the force of the sea a space for contemplation.
For Nivison, landscape is never simply landscape. He has lived and worked on the land for much of his life, observing its heat, drought, rain, changing light and sudden violence. These experiences have become part of the language of his painting. He is not interested in reproducing nature literally, but in expressing what it feels like to inhabit it, to carry its atmosphere and uncertainty. This is what makes Big Seas, A Memory so powerful. The storm becomes a state of mind. The sea carries the memory of absence. Nature does not describe grief; it gives grief somewhere to exist.
In Nivison's work, the landscape becomes a kind of living archive. It holds sensations rather than facts: the force of weather, the silence of a place, the feeling of walking alone, the memory of someone who is no longer there. The physical world and the inner world begin to overlap. Memory, in this sense, is not behind us. It remains embedded in the places we inhabit.
Pnina Afik, Holding the Fragments
A few rooms away, Pnina Afik takes us somewhere entirely different: inside the mind. In Holding the Fragments, memory appears not as a landscape but as something broken and reconstructed. Significant or traumatic experiences, Afik suggests, are rarely preserved as a continuous story. They return as fragments: a sound, a colour, an emotion, an image.
The work makes these fragments tangible. Geotextile cloth, rope, threads, nets, roses and iron are joined together, while the seams and gaps remain visible. Nothing is concealed. The scars become part of the object, just as they become part of the memory. For Afik, remembering is therefore an active process. We do not simply retrieve the past; we rebuild it, piece by piece, often around what is missing.
Laurette Succar, Tabula Rasa
As we ascend to the second floor, memory expands beyond the individual. Laurette Succar's Tabula Rasa is a polyptych of seven textured panels, rooted in her exploration of exile, transmission and cultural syncretism. The number seven, recurring across religions, cosmologies and systems of thought, points towards symbols and structures shared across cultures. Here memory becomes something we inherit. Stories, myths, images and rituals travel across generations. They change, but they leave traces. Succar's work asks what remains beneath those transformations and what connects apparently distant cultures. The title Tabula Rasa, meaning a blank slate, becomes almost a question: can we ever begin from nothing when so much of what we are has already been given to us?
Three artists, three forms of memory. The landscape carries one, another survives in fragments, another is transmitted through culture. And perhaps the most interesting part is what happens when we recognise something of our own memory in theirs. At Palazzo Mora, these traces are not simply remembered. They take form, and invite us to look at our own.
By Micaela Skerl