What do we remember most vividly — and what do we desperately try to forget? How can art help us resist the manipulation of memory and rebuild shared realities across borders, cultures, and lived experiences? And to what extent can we truly control what remains within us when history itself becomes a battlefield?
The Art of (Not) Forgetting is an exhibition rooted in an ongoing artistic and research-based practice developed by Berlin-based visual artist, essayist, and memory researcher Olga Bubich. It emerged in the winter of 2021, at a time of escalating repression in Belarus and what the artist describes as systemic “memory censorship.” Confronted with the deliberate reshaping of public narratives and the erasure of lived experience, Bubich turned her attention to the fragile and elusive nature of memory itself.
At the heart of this exhibition are the “mental travels” of approximately thirty participants — primarily Belarusian women and LGBTQ+ individuals — who took part in intimate Zoom and Skype sessions during the pandemic. As they recalled their most resourceful and most painful memories — something they wished to preserve forever and something they would rather forget — Bubich captured their faces in real time. The resulting portraits, rendered in a deliberately lo-fi, pixelated aesthetic, reflect the malleability and vulnerability of recollection. The blurred textures and digital interruptions become more than formal choices; they echo the instability of memory under pressure, turning each image into a visual trace of remembering and forgetting in process.
Alongside the portraits presented here, the exhibition features personal texts written by the participants after the online sessions. Published in the eponymous photobook (2022) and now recontextualised within the gallery space, these narratives remain fully controlled by their authors — in format, tone, and level of detail. Together, they form what might be understood as a collective emotional memory cloud: a shared yet polyphonic archive that resonates across languages, borders, and identities.
At a time when authoritarian and populist regimes attempt to weaponise history, the act of remembering becomes both deeply personal and profoundly political. This exhibition does not monumentalise trauma, nor does it attempt to fix memory into a single narrative. Instead, it creates a space of sincerity — where vulnerability, doubt, grief, tenderness, and resilience coexist. It suggests that memory is never static; it shifts internally through the neurological mechanisms of the brain and externally through systems of power that seek to control it.The Art of (Not) Forgetting invites viewers to reflect on memory as a site of agency and responsibility. What can we hold onto in times of “memory wars”? What stories must be protected from erasure? And how can collective futures be built not on imposed narratives, but on shared, carefully held experiences?
About the artist:
Olga Bubich is a Belarus-born essayist, photographer, curator and lecturer from Belarus extensively working in the field of memory studies. In 2021, she published “The Art of (Not) Forgetting” – a photobook exploring the elusive nature of memories formation. The project has eventually developed into a series of events: exhibitions, talks, and memory workshops Olga has held in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Georgia, Sweden, and Hong Kong. In 2022, she was invited to Berlin as an ICORN fellow, where she has been based since then.
This exhibition is part of Hybrid Futures project funded by Arts Council England.
