Certain movies leave unforgettable traces in our memory – or do they?
– What do we actually remember when a movie makes an impression on us?
ROOM I
Cecilia Westerberg takes Boris Pasternak’s partly autobiographical novel Dr. Zhivago as her point of departure in her solo exhibition – Looking for Lara – and works with different aspects of displacement in the individual and collective memory. In the first part of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg takes her starting point in a number of interviews, with people who have seen the classical film Dr. Zhivago from 1965. Westerberg examines, through simple questions about which scenes, figures or things that has made the greatest impression, how our memory of Dr. Zhivago is part of our collective image-bank and therefore collective memory. And at the same time is an entirely different part of our individual memory. In the first room of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg is showing oil paintings with scenes from Dr. Zhivago. The scenes are chosen partly from the answers from the interviews.
ROOM II
In the second room of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg takes her point of departure in her own journey to Russia and focuses on the interaction between fiction and reality. In Spring 2008 Cecilia Westerberg traveled to Peredelkino, where Boris Pasternak lived and wrote the book Dr. Zhivago. In this part of the exhibition Westerberg once again focuses on how fiction meets reality. This time though, it’s through her own experience of the odyssey from (film) fiction to reality – and finally her meeting with Russia. Westerberg especially focuses on her experience of the Americanized film version of Dr. Zhivago and a contemporary Russia year 2008. The account of Westerberg’s journey has turned into a video, oil paintings and aquarelles from Moscow, which will be shown in the second room of the exhibition.
The film Dr. Zhivago is based on a book by the Russian author Boris Pasternak. In 1958 he received the Nobel Price in Literature for this book.
Dr. Zhivago is no. 36 in the American Film Academy’s Top 100 in the last 100 year.
Cecilia Westerberg (1967) works with video/ -animation, paintings and drawings. Cecilia has previously worked with movies as a thematically starting point, for instance at her latest solo-exhibition in Frankfurt, spring 2008. Here Andrei Tarkovskys war movie Ivan’s Childhood (where World War II is portrayed though the eyes of a child) was her starting point. Cecilia has exhibited in several international exhibitions ex. In South Korea, France, Germany, Great Britain, She is currently participating in the Film Festival NU in Malmö, Sweden.
Hey man, was just browsing through the internet looking for some information and came across your blog. I am impressed by the information that you have on this blog. It shows how well you understand this subject. Bookmarked this page, will come back for more. You, my friend, ROCK!!!