IOANA SISEA | IN PERPETUUM | POINT
22 Aprilie – 8 Mai 2016
VERNISAJ | 22 Aprilie | Ora 19.00

From clutch of hand we drop a stone into water, see it disappear and watch the ripples commemorate the event, extending their announcement into space with fading register, like a sound echoing itself into inaudibility.
At some point they fade from view, but their information is not lost; it is transferred into other forms of energy in a kinetic continuum of memory.
What does it mean to remember? Memories exist inside us and unconsciously shape decisions we make, yet we often have no awareness of such influence nor access to the memories asserting it.
Occasionally, external stimuli like smells, sounds, colours, words will unlock a previously forgotten experience or sometimes only a blurred sensation of such.
All we can be sure of is a hidden world inside each of us constantly shaping our feelings and assumptions: a pool of memories where experiences perpetually drop new stones and ripples crash, combine delete in symphonies of harmony and discord.
Our lives become the kinetic manifestations of this symphony, each experience being both an echo of something past and a new call into the cave complete with new disturbances and reverberations.
And what of our heritage, what waves and echoes do we receive from our past, our ancestry and our upbringing and how does this exert its echo inside of us? How does the world of our parents extend down into our own?
When our first memories are formed we see hands not faces: Hands are at the height of our eyes. Hands offer safety, support, affection and protection. Our memories of our parents’ hands are of a time when we entrusted ourselves to them completely, when our own hands lacked the proficiency for our own survival. Reaching for their hand was our most fundamental impulse for protection and support.
Our parents’ hands mediate our interaction with the world turning what would otherwise be just a receptor for information about form and quality into a device for emotional and physical survival. We are taught how to communicate, express affection, elaborate our thoughts, build things, manifest our creative impulses and leave a trace of ourselves beyond ourselves.

This exhibition asks visitors to return to the time when they themselves looked up mainly at hands. To remember that period when they entrusted themselves to others in total innocence. When they received the guidance and protection of hey parents as they learned how to create their sense of experience in the world.

ARTIST STATEMENT
“To remember means to relive a past experience. When we think of the time we learned how to ride a bike, in that moment the bike exists again, dad exists again holding the steering, the trees on the street exists again. Memory is not a finite experience but repetitive and ongoing gesture.”(Ioana Sisea)
“Să îţi aminteşti ceva înseamnă să retrăieşti la o altă intensitate o experienţă din trecut. Când ne reamintim cum am învăţat să mergem pe bicicletă, în acel moment bicicleta există din nou, tata care ţinea ghidonul există din nou, copacii verzi de pe stradă există din nou. Experienţa redevine vie de fiecare dată când ne gândim la tata, de fiecare dată când mergem pe bicicletă, sau atunci când noi suntem la rândul nostru părinţi.
Amintirea nu este un moment finit ci un gest aflat intr-o perpetuă repetiţie.”( Ioana Sisea)