RAY Echoes
Memory

30 May to 22 September 2024
Deutsche Börse AG, The Cube, Eschborn

Once again, we are participating in the international RAY Triennial of Photography, which will be held from 3 May to 1 September 2024, presenting the group exhibition “RAY Echoes. Memory”. More than 11 institutions in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region take part in the RAY programme, presenting contemporary photography and related media on the theme “ECHOES” at various exhibition venues.

"RAY Echoes. Memory" shows eight international artistic positions that deal with the role of photography as a carrier of memory. In their works, the artists question how missing or blurred memories can be (re)created using photographic images. They visualise how elastic our memory is when it comes to storing and reproducing the past and show how what we have seen fades and is replaced by new images.

In her series “memories I don’t have”, the German artist Johanna Schlegel searches for a way to visualise the missing memories of her childhood. By chemically processing photographs from her family album, she creates blurs on the surface of the images that express the gaps in her memory. The feeling of anxiety and climatic threat that the US-American artist Mimi Plumb associates with memories of her youth in the small town of Walnut Creek on the West Coast of the United States pervades the cool photographs in her series “The White Sky”. The German artist Jana Bissdorf creates a link between different levels of time and narratives in her group of works collectively entitled “Wege zum Glück”, for which she physically combines found black-and-white images with her own colour photographs, thus creating new associative spaces between the present and the past. In the series “Being there”, created together with Lee Shulman, the founder of the Anonymous Project, Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop places himself retrospectively in the snapshots of a white US-American middle class of the 1950s and 1960s with such playful lightness and irony that the political message of the group of works is not immediately apparent. South African artist Lebohang Kganye revives the memories of her deceased mother in her work “Her-Story” by superimposing her pictures from the family albums with self-portraits in her mother’s clothes. In “Walking back to happiness”, the British artist Maisie Cousins uses artificial intelligence to create images of unphotographed childhood memories, in this case of an amusement park she used to visit. The work of the French artist Sophie Calle revolves on various levels around questions of memory and transience and the associated gaps. She shares her inner monologue in touching combinations of image and text. The questioning of transience through the medium of photography can also be found in the works of the American artist Nicholas Nixon, who, in the impressive series “The Brown Sisters”, portrayed his wife Bebe and her three sisters together every year from 1975 to 2022.

The exhibited artists are: Jana Bissdorf, Sophie Calle, Maisie Cousins, Omar Victor Diop and Lee Shulman/The Anonymous Project, Lebohang Kganye, Nicholas Nixon, Mimi Plumb and Johanna Schlegel.

"RAY Echoes. Memory" was curated by Anne-Marie Beckmann. The concept of RAY ECHOES 2024 was jointly developed by Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation), Alexandra Lechner (freelance curator), Celina Lunsford (Fotografie Forum Frankfurt) and Matthias Wagner K (Museum Angewandte Kunst).

The Cube Eschborn, 2024 © Robert Schittko