17 December 2019

Ferdinandeum exhibition 'Forgetting. Fragments of Remembrance' leads visitors to the making of historical consciousness through centuries to the digital age

At the end of the year, annual reviews and trend reports are published by various media and platforms, from daily news publications to search engines. In digital times, performance statistics are an important source for these collections of themes, topics, names or trends. 

Right in time with the special review season, the exhibition ‘Forgetting. Fragments of Remembrance’ at the Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, capital city of the Austrian Federal State Tyrol opened last Friday on 13 December. Until 8 March 2020, visitors are invited to reflect upon how and who has or is building people’s historical consciousness and will be in future the architects of the foundation of culture.

fig.: Insight into the exhibition ‘Forgetting. Fragments of Remembrance’ at the Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria (13 December 2019 - 8 March 2020). The expedition is arranged between around 8.000 archive boxes and historical artefacts like a glove finger spreader, contemporary art by artists and texts by selected authors. Photo: © Wolfgang Lackner.

The tour is a snippet of reality seen by the curators. The artworks, the texts, the objects were chosen after objective criteria for being in the one or other way representative for the topic and our time. Visitors are encouraged to approach the exhibition critically, questioning the selection, reflecting upon the responsibility of the ones who work at museums and collect objects, texts for people’s memory. The tour leads through decades, centuries up to nowadays digital age. Here, the visitors will be interactively involved into the question if and when it’s positive or negative to leave a digital footstep. Well, it’s the first time in history that the masses are in the position to be actively the curators of society’s memory by sharing and posting images, texts, music, art, their thoughts or critical statements. But is it a choice to be forgotten or to be remembered in digital media?

Strongly connected to the very probably unintentional choice forgetting vs. remembrance are the questions: Who limits or censors free speech or memory in digital media? And what’s the role of AI and algorithms in the digital selection process for making themes so important that they rule society?