Memory today is not what it used to be. What used to mark the relation of ourselves with the past, today intrudes upon the present through reproduction media, making the past inevitably part of the present. As a result, temporal boundaries shift just as the experiential dimension of space shrinks, and in the midst of today’s image saturation, memory fatigue sets in. Memories, yet seemingly present, fade faster or are simply blurred out in the overlap of others constantly re-appearing, making it virtually impossible to tell them apart, and to reconcile ourselves with the idea of what is real, what was crafted, and what has been forgotten.

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However, arranged mental imagery within familiar locations, still manages to retain information, where these spatial journeys anchor the ephemeral in the tangible. The photographs of Zaickz Moz extend the ancient practice of reconstruction into our contemporary condition. His work builds memory palaces not for private recollection alone, but as invitations extended to the public. Through spatial and personal photography, we are guided into the architectures of remembrance that exist somewhere between document and invention. The exhibition, in this sense, recomposes while opening a collective exercise of interpretation, where these new inventions of the imagination feel so real that they establish dream-reality confusions, struggling to distinguish between what has happened and what has been imagined.

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If it was previously thought that memory bound us in some deep sense to times past, “Collective Figment” rather presents memory as a mode of re-presentation and as belonging ever more to the present. For the exhibition like a dream, mixes and reinterprets. And in the act of remembering, draws upon the same processes where fragments are retrieved, emotions are rekindled, and gaps are filled. The past does not return to us whole; it is rebuilt each time anew. We are taken into a personal journey and reconstruction of fragments past that build a virtual place that may now live in our imaginations too. With no full geographic grounding, the past is reorganized. With each series, spatial and visual memory are presented as a means to remember a complex past. Associating elements with specific places on a familiar route — a house, a room, or a road. However, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of invention, fiction, forgetting and absence.