The Past Is Present

Participant of Media Arts Film Screening in the Kala Art Gallery in Berkeley, CA, June 15, 2018.

The Past Is Present is a visual narrative on a momentary nature of time and memory. The work explores a relationship between the past and the present and how the two always coexist in a close proximity. How the former can be accessed, felt, and awakened, even if only for a split of a second, through the experiences of the latter.

A video footage of dandelions serves here as a trigger for my own childhood memory and a time capsule to bring 4 generations of women together – my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and myself.

From 1902 (the year my great-grandmother was born in Poland) to 2016. Through a family portrait incorporated into the video, its placement, pacing and transitioning, the moments when a split of time and a slippage of memory take place are both embodied and expressed.

Through perception and recollection, the echoes of the past are resonating in the present. Impossible to escape and often forcing themselves on the present, the reverberating traces of the past inevitably shape the future.