Petra Kubisova

In my work I have been looking at the role of memories in our lives. They either get activated by photographs and objects, or through our senses. I have also been looking at the role of forgetting and remembering.

Rhodopsin is an installation including darkness, sound, images, strobe lighting, sensors and coding.

I wanted to create a space where I could work closely with memory. In utilising darkness, the role of the other senses becomes predominant. Our perceptions change rapidly once the visual is questioned and inner visual world becomes more accessible.

I decided to combine sounds, photographs and strobe lighting in the dark space to resemble the relationship of the afterimage of the image and the echo of the sound wave. Something once happened, an origin of an event, and it either gets recorded in a fragmented way into our brains and comes back to us as an 'after image' and/or 'echo', or it gets forgotten.

The images, taken from my family archive, are stretched and enlarged. The afterimage is achieved by set of strobe light flashes, it allows the image to be seen in fragments and to be imprinted on the photosensitive layer, (called Rhodopsin) present in the retina of the eye, and then the image travels into the brain.

In this situation time plays a significant role. It’s a split of a second that we see the image. After that the eyes hold the picture for some time and which is then erased by another flash. 

Sounds, originally recorded in domestic spaces and nature, are taken away from its source, stretched to the point when they become obscure and abstract soundscapes, one nearly wonders if he/she heard something or not.