PRIVATE VIEW 23 JANUARY 6PM – 9PM As 2014 marks the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Paul Raftery unveils his latest project ‘Berlin Voids’atelier EURA Scrapbook‘s insight:
A month or so ago I was watching a program on BBc about the new and the old Russia. "Russia on 4 wheels"
(background: My grandparents were taken to Russia to be saved form the horrors of the Spanish Civil war with hundreds of other children who needed up growing up without a family in a foreign country. As teens, they ended up in the front where my grandad’s legs got frozen)
In this program, one of the presenters was visiting Stalingrad and meeting two elder who also were at the Volga…. One (like my grandma) had over the years idealised the regime and imagined it to be a faultless family, the second one (like my grandfather) attempted unsuccessfully to adjust the direction of his camarade’s train of thought… It was an odd realisation of the mechanisms that the mind creates to overcome difficulty and the way those shape our memories.
In front of tv I realised that my dad was right. History is written by those who come victorious and you should therefore take it with a pinch of salt as you can never be sure of what is fact and what fiction.
Visiting Berlin Voids I had the same odd feeling of being in front of a reflection of history that time, human and nature had now shaped in a way that was no longer possible to truly decide whether your eyes and the images were guiding you to the line that once separated East from West , or whether you were cleverly misguided by the hands of the story teller.
This is a brilliant opportunity for you to question yourself what is real and what isn’t but also to decide for yourself whether you care enough to find out or you can still be a happy spectator of someone else’s story.
Do not miss your last chance to visit Anise Gallery to find out!
See on www.anisegallery.co.uk