r/anemoia__phantasm

Group Exhibition Concept Proposal

The liminality of online spaces feels like dwelling in constant tension between connection and disconnection where niche and unspoken sentiments can find an outlet for expression as well as dissolution. It is there where sensations are collective, spectral and overflowing, escaping their origin and rendering them meaningless. From The Dictionary of Sorrows anemoia presents the verbalised feeling of nostalgia for a time that was never actually experienced, a shared sensibility circulating inside the online forum and blogosphere that is constantly adapted by sentimental web dwellers. 

Taking this as a base this exhibit confronts its own Unheimlichkeit, the alienated familiar, by applying anemoia to our most personal spaces where we navigate through the backrooms of our weirdcore daydreams and dreamcore nightmares. We want to encourage the act of wandering astray within this hauntological memory maze which will eventually lead us to our most vulnerable phantoms like the childhood home. The period of coming of age exists as a liminal gap in our process towards a predetermined 'adulthood ', and upon traversal of this barrier, we are ultimately divided by a one-directional mesh, able to perceive our personal memory, but also uniquely able to manipulate it. This exhibit propounds the viewers with a familiar environment, yet haunted by a self-inflicted distortion. Teddy bears become terrors, blankets become behemoths. The bedside night-light of one‘s youth flickers on its remaining AAA battery, racing like a sandglass in attempt to match pace with the jejune march of time. 

The program implores the viewers to question the human obsession with childhood, and to confront the dissonance of the reality, the coexistence of one‘s temporal halves, and the decay of the quondam as a plant-bed for the decomposer that feeds on reminiscence of the home.