Photographic memories

This year's Beijing International Art Biennale shows how Chinese and foreign artists elaborate on motifs of memories and dreams.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Two works by Toronto-based Sara Angelucci show how artists use images to express the loss of knowledge and environment. She created the photographic installation Aviary Series and the video The Anonymous Chorus in 2013, both using old photos purchased online.

The Aviary Series is a set of four portrait photos in which Angelucci seeks to relate the disappearance of a family connection to the extinction of birds in North America.

She enlarged four carte-de-visite photos of the 19th century－a kind of palm-sized portrait that first became popular in France and then spread around the world.

"Because of the low cost of taking these small photos, people would make many copies. They traded them with families and friends to finally assemble an album of such portraits. It was like Facebook accounts back then," Angelucci says.

She says the pictures in the Aviary Series were all abandoned and the subjects are unknown to the world today, and hence the family memories held by these people no longer exist. It reminds her of an ancient philosophical theory that compared recollecting a memory to chasing a bird. "You try to capture it, but it flies away."

She thus transformed the figures' faces into the heads of four birds that are either endangered or already extinct. By creating these hybrid human-bird creatures, she advocates that humans should have empathy for nature and live with it in harmony, instead of trying to control or damage it.

Angelucci expresses the same feeling of loss in The Anonymous Chorus. She animated parts of an old picture of an American family to make it come alive to viewers. A projector casts light on each of the dozen family members and visitors can hear synchronized singing connecting them with the time and space when the photo was taken.