Absolute Memory: An Archive of Softness features artists who use the ‘hard’ forms of installation, video, sculpture, and photography to archive the ‘soft’ – memory, feelings, autobiography, auto-fiction, and the everyday as material. The exhibition explores works of art that treat everyday, intangible experiences of marginal subjects as material objects. 

More a series of questions than an answer, Absolute Memory: An Archive of Softness dreams of the archive as something softer – able to hold both the tangible and intangible realities of the lived experience. By looking to artists who use nontraditional archival materials such as memory, feelings, affinities, ways of being, fictional realism, and the everyday as material, the exhibition begins to unravel and reconstitute containers of cultural memory. Ultimately, we ask, how can an archive be soft, and how can an exhibition space, in its ephemerality and visual nature, be the construction site of a more absolute archive? 

Absolute Memory: An Archive of Softness features artists Widline Cadet, Xandra Ibarra, Michael Jang, Clifford Prince King, and Kenneth Tam. 

Curated by the CCA Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice Class of 2024: Samantha Hiura, Megan Kelly, and Sherry Xiang. 

Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts 
On view: April 26-May 18, 2024 
Opening Reception: April 26, 2024 | 6-8pm 

PUBLIC PROGRAM: Letter Writing with Survived and Punished
April 27, 2024 | 4 to 6 pm (in-person at the Wattis Bar)

This exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition catalogue publication, featuring artwork documentation, original essays by the curators and featured essayist Sloane Holzer, and an artist interview. 

Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is open Wednesday-Saturday from 12-6pm.