The Memory House

Isabella Fürnkäs' installation The Memory House inevitably resembles a house in its external appearance, but differs from this vision, as its walls seem more like a velum, which extends from one side, spanning the roof, to the next. Nothing is stored in the house itself, it harbours no traces of life. Rather, it functions as a framework on which memories become entangled, printed on thin pantyhose fabric that wraps around the construct of the house like a skin. Inspired by the flood of digital images, the fabric serves as a visual and associative archive. It provides insights into past and present cultural practices and reveals collective and private fragments of memory. Pornographic scenes can be found alongside human entrails and images of medieval witch burnings. Like scars on human skin, these images inscribe themselves into the fabric and the mind of the viewer. They leave deep impressions, activate the personal visual memory and evoke a rush of thought that provides a cross-section of human history and is both attractive and disturbing at the same time.

- Text by Lara Müller

Although the individual drawings, photos, films and installations by Isabella Fürnkäs are singular works with their own titles, they only unfold their full effect in their entirety. They are fictions and yet they are based in real life and thus they complement and reinforce each other. This is why the artist has grouped the individual works under the common title Inner workings, with the subtitle Das fressende Zimmer. With this title alone, she contrasts today’s cult of the flawless exterior of bodies and objects with the uncovering and exposure of what is throbbing, flowing, being digested, moldering, decaying and aging beneath the surface.

For example the small house that is set up in the entrance room of the Clages gallery. The walls are formed by a transparent tights fabric printed with an abundance of photos, which gives the house a physicality. The fabric alone and especially the flood of images are uncanny. The pictures show decapitated queens, human entrails, pornographic scenes and witches... They are traumatic images from the cultural memory reservoir of the most diverse cultural epochs. They attract the eye, they fascinate and they repel. Disturbed by the images, one hardly dares to look inside the house. And indeed; rumpled sheets, disorder... What has happened here? 

- Text excerpt by Noemi Smolik

[..] Remember how you used to build pillow fortresses as a child? The Memory House (2023) in the first room is similarly comforting (at first glance at least). Inside, electric outlets and a notebook made up of ceramics are draped in white bed sheets. A sketchbook peeks out. The outer shell of the house is full of images: naked cats, artworks, anatomic illustrations, product designs, porn.

- Text excerpt by Jennifer Braun