Mnemonic

Isabella Fürnkäs engages with the media flood of images in the 21st century through performative, installation-based, and time-based techniques. She explores the influences of digitalization on personal identity and interpersonal relationships. Consumed media, text messages, headlines, and visual stimuli not only shape our viewpoints and communication patterns, but they also have the power to transform societal structures. In her works, Fürnkäs reflects the fragility and vulnerability of the self and of togetherness by combining seemingly unrelated images and shifting contexts.

This media-reflective approach is also evident in her work Mnemonic/Gedächtniskunst (2021), a collage of around sixty images filtered by the artist through search histories from the infinite expanses of the internet and printed on PVC tarpaulin. On the large-format tapestry, representations of ancient sculptures, Medusa heads, Janus faces, and historical motifs are juxtaposed with photos of naked cats, fetish masks, and pornographic scenes. The abundance of images from different temporal and cultural contexts inevitably leads to an overwhelming and disorienting perception, confronting us directly with both the beautiful and the abyssal aspects from the digital image memory of our collective past and present.

- Text by Anja Bauer-Kersken

Small elements of everyday life – the media we consume, the images we see – make up our identities. In Isabella Fürnkäs‘ artistic practice, different types of media act as tools, to constantly balance out these everyday aspects of being. Combining different images, her work Mnemonic forms a contradictory liaison of past and present, beauty and brutality; resulting in a parallelism of familiarity and unsettlement. A tarpaulin or banner made of PVC materializes a collage of images, ranging from antique sculptures over pornography to odd playground slides, persistently circling around the human in different states and roles. The viewer is drawn into the well-known flood of images but simultaneously confronted with its perversion and overload. Fürnkäs takes advantage of our relationship to the image. It’s power over our emotions as demonstrations of political or social power become the playground for her work. She dissects systems of visual politics and rearranges the tracks our culture leaves. In this plastic memory, relics of antiquity merge with our search histories and tell us where we come from and what defines us. A constant trickle of thoughts, new windows popping up on our screen and never ending search suggestions describe the creation as well as the perception of this work. From a digital mess of public and hidden images, Fürnkäs artificially creates one version of collective past, present and future. With Mnemonic she exceeds the roll of the observer and joins the game of harmfully harmless iconoclasm and propaganda

- Text by Lucy Degens