Remind me to remember to forget
2006 | Single-Channel Video, 2’50’’
By Oraib Toukan
Previous showings
Valencia/Sao Paulo Biennial, 2007
Espace SD/ X-anadu, Beirut 2006
ART OMI, New York, 2006
Remind me to remember to forget is a video that posits Middle
Eastern memory as a memory that has somehow been "made-to-forget,"
a "memory" that has become accustomed to being raped,
eradicated, and disposed of right before it shifts from present
to past.
Entranced by the absurd US media coverage of the 2006 Israeli
war on Lebanon, Oraib Toukan obsessively wrote and re-wrote
the phrase ‘remind me to remember to forget,’
until the words and their meaning were eventually explored
in a video.
In a split screen format,
Remind me to remember to forget depicts two separate but synchronized performances. On one
half of the screen, the phrase is frantically written in gold
glitter and then inhaled through a red, white, and blue nozzle.
On the other half of the screen is a close up shot of a throat
that concurrently breathes in and out.
Set to the mind-numbingly hypnotizing sound of stifled breathing,
the artist is suggestively seen remembering to forget...to
erase all that she recollects…even the phrase that reminds
her to do so.
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