“We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly...”

— Tommy Orange, There There

one never remembers alone, an exhibition, film series, and pedagogical platform, examines the ways memory can be transmitted through generations, both temporally and spatially. The exhibition brought together artists whose work considers the notion that one’s past can be passed on to another. Employing archival and performative interventions in media such as photography, photomontage, video, printmaking, and installation, exhibiting artists jointly activated iterations of memory and formations of kinship, building bridges between themselves and their personal and/or collective lineages. These interventions put forth a visual language that attempts to unravel colonial narratives, convey the varied experience of movement and migration, and imagine an anti-colonial futurity.

The title one never remembers alone references how the concepts of collective memory, diaspora, and cultural identity function as social phenomena. This project interrogates the ways memories are formed through the bonds of kinship related to the experience of dispossession and diasporic movement. As a corollary, one never remembers alone also explores “rememory,” as coined by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved. Rememory refers to the recollection of an obscured memory that can be similar to a haunting, an uncanny sensation of both familiarity and unfamiliarity.

The film series and accompanying website use the exhibition as a point of departure to delve deeper into these themes.

About the MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program

one never remembers alone is the culminating project of the 2020 MA Candidates in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. This intensive master’s-level program offers rigorous training in the practice and history of curating studied through the lenses of critical theory, art history, and visual culture. During two years of full-time academic study, students explore different modes of curatorial practice combining seminars and professional training. The curatorial project is developed through the MA Practicum, a three-term course studying the history of curating, exhibition-making, and arts programming. In Practicum students examine case studies of curatorial practices, then work collaboratively to conceptualize, research, and organize a final project, usually an exhibition or program, that is accompanied by a publication, website, event, or other kind of interface with the public.

For further information about the USC Roski MA Program, please visit: https://roski.usc.edu/academic/ma