In
Milan Kundera’s novel, Ignorance, Irina asks Sylvie “Why are you
still here?” after the revolution had taken place in Czechia in 1989. After
many deliberations, they realise that their interrupted history cannot be
repeated, but also the reconciliation with that part of them which stayed
behind in Prague cannot take place in any predictable way. In Odyssey,
when Ulysses comes back after twenty years, the Ithacans indeed remember
him, but to his disillusionment without nostalgia.
Such
nomadic themes of emigration, absence, memory, forgetting, nostalgia,
indifference and the fragility of presence are explored in Us + I.
The exhibition looks at the private self in conversation with itself:
examining and verification of the social self; reflecting the self-conscious
self; different psychological mutations of the self; distorted perceptions
of the self; and memories of the self.
