ALL COLLECTIONS ARE THE MEMORY OF A TIME, REPRESENTATIONS OF ALL THAT A CIVILISATION DEEMS VALUABLE: ITS CULTURE, ITS ART, ITS TECHNIQUE, MATERIALS, IDENTITIES, CONCEPTS...
«Time past and time future […] point to one end, which is always present». (T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets)
The exhibition entitled There is a lot of past to go. Oroi brings us face to face with the Artium Collection as an image of the multiple, complex memory of the present. Memory that constitutes us as people, that shapes language and representation, time and document, enigma and suspicion. The exhibition comprises near a hundred works from the Collection, analytical tools that deal with memory based on various social and cultural implications in its relationship with history, economy or power.
The starting point of the project is the need to analyse the intrinsic values of memory attached to these objects that we call works of art. How the richness of a collection is constructed and, in particular, how to maintain the complexity, intensity and enigma enclosed in this heritage in a context in which the various political, economic, cultural and leisure classes tend towards simplification and univocal discourse, thereby calling into question the system of values based on plurality, freedom of thought, knowledge and criticism.
OROI, “memory” in Basque, can be found at the etymological base of an extremely broad, open and plural semantic field. On the other hand, the subtitle, There is a lot of past to go, positions us in an indeterminate space of memory, the memory of a past, but located in a time to come. This indeterminacy undoubtedly leads us to another moment, neither past nor future, but the present, a present framed in complexity, in simultaneous, overlapping times.