NYAB Event - Ruth Rosengarten “Dear Fusia”

Ruth Rosengarten “Dear Fusia”

Rooster Gallery

This event has ended.

“A few years ago, after my mother died, I was entrusted with the task of scanning her family photographs, in a bid to constitute an inter-generational, digital family album for my brother, my sister, their children and myself. I was, of course, fascinated by these photographs as time capsules, their particular arrest holding long-vanished moments in my own pre-history, as well as hinting tangentially at broad historical upheavals: the world my mother inhabited as a child was buffeted and reshaped by revolution, war and mass migration. I also felt drawn to the now quaint idea that a single photograph might staunchly stand as the unique material testimony of, and memorial to, a whole important or even life-changing event: my mother’s momentous departure from China, where she had lived up to the age of twenty, is marked by one quayside photograph.

Soon, however, I found myself transfixed not only by these images, but also by the frail existence of the photographs themselves as material objects. In our age of digital snapping and sharing, we have all but lost this notion of the photograph’s materiality. In the context, then, of the “thingness” of these photographs, their verso sides became particularly compelling. I made a body of work titled Verso, scanning or re-photographing and printing in postcard size the backs of these photographs. Accumulated en masse, their mottled painterliness had an abstract beauty, but also evinced the traces – and told the story – of the passage of these objects from hand to hand, from album to desk, from purse to shoebox. Many of these backs of photographs bore verbal inscriptions (brief descriptions or, more often, dedications), in idioms that seemed old fashioned, and in looped scripts that themselves had since become outmoded. In Dear Fusia, I focus on these inscriptions and dedications.

I have now returned to my mother’s photographs, wanting to transform these ephemeral scraps into photographic objects, estranging them from their source by amplifying them manyfold and having them printed on luxurious rag-paper. For Dear Fusia, I focused on a small sub-category of photographs: those given as keepsakes, often tiny photos exchanged between my mother and her friends, boyfriends, and finally her husband-to-be, my father. These dedications not only authenticate an experience with the “I was here” stamp of validation, but also spell out an exchange between two people. “Remember me,” they say, and continue to say, attempting to claim their tiny corner of immortality, but in fact showing how quickly people vanish, and how, through merely a couple of generations, the memory of them evaporates. “Who’s Harry?” I wonder, “Who’s Lily?” I’ll never know. The photographs track one person’s geographic dislocation, over two decades – from China to Israel to South Africa – and with it, the morphing of her name from the Russian “Fusia” to the anglicised “Fay” or, on occasion, the Americanised “Fanny” or “Faye.” In one photograph, which she has, in a later hand (red pen) dated “1942,” it’s touching to see her childish handwriting essaying the curlicues of her own signature.

To focus attention on the mnemonic haunting of these “readymade” or “found” photographs, I have superimposed on the prevailing verso side the faintest ghost of the recto side, thus transforming both. Each verso side contains, then, the pale ghost of its recto, and in this conflation, the photographs tell yet another story, at once of a material object and of a nomadic narrative, a story of affective engagements, of which each image is a fragmentary, constitutive part.”

Born in Israel, Ruth Rosengarten has lived in England since 2001. She received degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Ph.D in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London. Her studio practice for some years now has focused on drawing and photography, while in her recent theoretical work, she has explored concerns with memory and the archive in contemporary art, and images of ageing and dying in contemporary photography and blogs. Ruth lived for twenty years in Lisbon, where alongside her studio practice, she was engaged with both art history and art criticism, teaching on various undergraduate and postgraduate courses and writing for several weekly and monthly publications. She has exhibited variously and published widely, as well as curating several large exhibitions, the most recent of which was was Between Memory and Archive at the Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon, in 2013. She is a Research Associate at Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg.