2024 Finalists

The relationship between memory and its physical storage mediums is an oppressive one, in the sense that the latter dictates to the former its horizons. How many false memories are born from old family photos? Trillions? And how often have those imagined screen memories become the cornerstone of one’s feelings and knowledge about their inner world? In this light, the act of photography begins to seem almost like a crime — a potential basis for forgery. No amount of genuineness from the photographer can save the day; even nudes are not safe from the “creative” aspect of memory work (especially when considering the fact that a naked person is never truly nude — they cover themselves with stories after they’ve forgotten ever being possessed by them in the first place). When we think we are capturing moments, in reality, we are participating in the creation of memories. And from those memories, unconscious ideals emerge.

During the nineties, the ideal domicile in Estonia, recently caught up in the market economy, was a private house with all the privacy, comfort, and luxury it promised. For most, however, this ideal was unachievable — many had to settle for an apartment. But other joys of consumption opened to the wider public, as many products and apparatuses that had previously been deficit goods became widely available. Photography, once reserved for those willing to invest considerable time and effort, now became accessible to anyone, thanks to cheap point-and-shoot compact cameras and photo labs in nearly every shopping center. This led to a literal photographic explosion — of photographs on photo paper — which, by the end of the decade, was extinguished by the tidal wave that was the onset of digital
photography.

For the artist’s parents, these times marked the end of their youth and the beginning of adulthood. Because that is what having children means. For the artist, these times are past, her past, which she herself cannot return to. A past from which forms and figures emerge, almost familiar, but not quite. Not like they are here, in this picture, in this apartment, in this year — somewhere in the mid-nineties, when everyone wore clothes made of materials that, even now, your nerve endings can still sense at the back of your mind — clothes that, in their quaintness and slight old-fashionedness, still manage to warm your heart.

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