Generations of Memory
Curator.
Madrasat Adeera Alula x Britich Council x RCU
Generations of Memory is a group exhibition inviting eight female handicraft artists from a small desert village to create new, experimental works exploring memory, family history, and personal storytelling. The project encourages artists to move beyond traditional methods and take creative risks—transforming familiar crafts such as weaving, pigment making, pottery, textiles, painting, and jewelry into deeply personal expressions. At its core, the exhibition asks how memory is passed through generations and embedded in materials, gestures, and stories. I worked with the artisans to grow their memory archive and empower them to produce touching and personal works they had never had the means, trust or funding to make before.
I dreamt I was a rock in my past life
Exhibition while a resident at Fabrica Research Centre
I came to Fabrica with a curiosity towards rocks, their sounds, their dreams and their edges. What sound do they make? Turns out, rocks and stones are pretty quiet… they stand so still and silent that you’d forget they exist… until they interact with another. It is only in interaction that sound exists; in touching the surface of another. I interviewed the rocks, in a way, and used their sounds to explore what it feels like to be a rock interacting with the world. Then in a dream it came to me, the feeling of being a rock in my past life. What did that sound like? Look like? Feel like? How long was that life time, since rocks never die but simply rebirth in an eroded form? In the end, I interviewed the rock- or maybe the rock interviewed me.
This installation invites the wonderer to engage the senses.
Listen to the sounds/ whispers of the rocks.
Lift them to your eye, look at their surface.
Touch their edges and scars; feel their skin erode through your fingertips.
© 2022 by Mitoshka Alkova