Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

Introduction

VII Within the recent general discussions of cultural and historical memory, in Europe the extension of the family known as the European Union has drawn special attention to the problems of belonging, homeland, exile, and homecoming , as well as language, trauma, and memory. When daily politics continuously insists on probing into who has the right to remember what, with whom, and where, it is no coincidence that we have chosen to examine the role of family pictures in private and collective memory. We believe that the notion of family best expresses the problems of belonging, be it belonging to a people, a nation, or any other type of family. The notion of family offers itself from multiple perspectives: family as homeland, family as space and time, family as burden, heritage, package, family as loss and absence, family as cliché, family as conversation, family as memory or the absence of memory, family as identity, family as history, or family as narrative, to mention only a few. The more we immerse ourselves in this topic, the more obvious it becomes that we are not always in a position to decide who or what belongs Introduction VIII INTRODUCTION where, or to what extent belonging is often purely a question of tradition, habit, or, at times, of prejudice. Historic events and turning points often deeply interfere with the integrity and fate of families, and consequently, the (self-)representations of family are often involved with this larger context. One of the most intriguing fields in the research of cultural memory is, undoubtedly, the study of family pictures, a topic equally involving artists, historians, literary and art historians , sociologists, and anthropologists. Post-structuralism, feminism, and the notion of micro-history have all contributed to the rise in significance of personal genres in all disciplines. After “grand” history was revealed to be constructed along the lines of particular ideologies and interests, which meant that we could no longer take notions of objectivity and truth for granted, it seemed as if the private sphere, and within it the family picture, were able to promise a more legitimate truth. According to Pierre Nora, how a society wishes to see its future also determines what it wishes to remember from its past, and this is what, in turn, offers meaning to the present, which connects both past and future. We can have no inkling of what future generations will have to know about our lives in order to understand their own; therefore we are obliged to salvage and archive everything (or at least to try). As Christian Boltanski, one of the artists Éva Forgács writes about, expressed, “[…] the effort still to be made is great. So many years will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labeled in a safe place—secured against theft, fire and nuclear war—from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point. Then, being thus assured of never dying, I may finally rest.”1 We no longer possess the past but become one with it. Family pictures play a highly complex role in the process of remembrance, as they are able not only to capture memory but also, at times, to stand in for it. Supplemented with two additional essays, this volume is a selection of the presentations given at the conference Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory, organized by the Hungarian section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in conjunction with the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) at the Goethe Institute in Budapest (November 10–11, 2006). Given the topic’s strong inINTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION IX terdisciplinary nature, the conference covered a wide range of disciplines with the participation of well-known local and international experts and artists working in this field. A number of exhibitions associated with the conference were also organized (Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Barcsay Hall; Studio Gallery; Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros), presenting artists in whose work the family features either as concrete story or as metaphor. What prompted us to turn to this topic is a long and often painful series of memorial acts that have taken place in Hungary since 1989, acts that are meant to interpret and reinterpret the past, often focusing on topics and events that previously had been considered taboo for collective memory (such as the role of national...