Daniel Blaufuks

Works on Memory

14 January - 25 February 2012

Works on Memory will be the first solo exhibition in the UK by one of Portugal's most celebrated contemporary artists, whose work combines video, photography, sound and installation to explore issues of time and memory. Daniel Blaufuks is an award winning Portuguese photographer whose work is represented in various public collections, such as the Foundation's Modern Art Centre, the Berardo collection and others in Portugal and abroad.

Blaufuks focuses on what we remember and what we forget, occupying the territory between public and private memory, recollection and oblivion. Objects become a cue for something else, for some emotional relationship, for some reminiscence that is valued but remains inviolate, untouched.

In his 2010 work The Business of Living, Blaufuks depicts two office wall clocks alongside each other, one with the hands at 6.00, the other at 6.15. This piece could be read as a reflection on how slow time passes at work, or perhaps it ironically hints at Andy Warhol's notion that we all crave '15 minutes of fame'.

In contrast to the works in the exhibition that signal daily life, there are those incidents, those histories, that we would like to forget but can't stop remembering. Terezin is one of those stories, which has deceptiveness as a basis for its existence. Contrasting the transformed images made by the Nazis about the life in the Terezin ghetto with the contemporary reality of the camp, Blaufuks deals with the question of trauma and at the same time of the construction of historical memory.

The various bodies of Blaufuks' work on show at Ffotogallery and the accompanying publication, will together present a powerful and emotional reflection on time, of our relation to materiality, to memory, to history, to living and to dying.

Works on Memory will be showing at Ffotogallery, Cardiff from 14 January to 25 February 2012.

This exhibition is supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation within our Cultural Understanding theme.