Memories | Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen

Photogravure projects by Fiona Tan and Danh Vo are part of a thematic group exhibition on memories.

The exhibited artists’ projects touch on the phenomenon of memories from a materially as well as thematically and culturally point of view. The exhibition is part of a three-year series of exhibitions that annually, through a theme, focus on some of the special characteristics associated with photography as a medium.

In Shadow Archive Fiona Tan has built the architecture of the Belgian visionary Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum in 1:1 scale using computer generated imagery software. Whilst Tan’s circular architecture is registered in all its details the actual place does not exist. The series of photogravures shows Tan’s imagined interior views of Otlet’s never completed utopian archive. Today, the Mundaneum is known as the ‘Paper Google’ and considered a milestone in data collection and management, the basic idea behind the Internet.

Danh Vo’s photogravure series Archive of Dr. Joseph M. Carrier 1962–1973 is based on photographs of young Vietnamese men taken by Dr. Joseph M. Carrier, an American counterinsurgency specialist who worked in Vietnam for the RAND Corporation from 1962 to 1973. An anthropologist by training, Carrier left his job because his homosexuality was considered a security risk. While living in Vietnam, Carrier privately documented casual interactions between Vietnamese men with his camera. These interactions are intimate, but, in a Vietnamese context, not necessarily homoerotic. He later bequeathed his substantial archive to Danh Vo, for whom the images have a personal meaning: they are records of a cultural past that he recognizes as his own, but that, as a refugee, he never had the opportunity to experience firsthand.

Memories at Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen runs until 20 October 2024.