The Extended Now

PRESS RELEASE: THE EXTENDED NOW (Memento Projects) is the title of Danish artist Lisa Rosenmeier’s exhibition project, which opens at the North Jutland Art Museum on 8 October 2004. The exhibition marks the culmination to date of Rosenmeier’s series of Memento Projects – an investigation into time, identity and memory, on which the artist has been working since the year 2000. The title THE EXTENDED NOW refers to an ’inner now’ – our subjective experience of time in which the now is rarely experienced as a moment but rather as an extended quantity containing both memory of the past and expectations of the future. The extended now is the now of memory. But what does it mean to remember? And what does memory mean for our identity? It is questions of this nature that Lisa Rosenmeier explores in THE EXTENDED NOW (Memento Projects), an exhibition that seeks to bring a poetic focus to bear on the many facets – neuromedical, psychological, social and cultural historical – that go to form our identity The exhibition presents a number of installationary works that draw upon sound, pictures, video and sculptural objects.

Lisa Rosenmeier was trained as a painter at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but has for many years chiefly worked with photography and computer art – often in the border zone between art and science. In THE EXTENDED NOW (Memento projects) Rosenmeier has in every way exploded traditional pictorial space, creating a number of visual fragments – mental spaces – that can be experienced individually, but which in their entirety constitute an artistic exploration of identity and memory. Rosenmeier herself sees her project as both exploring and challenging these concepts, the questions of who we are and how we become who we are. The exhibition does not, however, offer any simple answers, but rather leaves it to the viewers to search for answers as they pass among the works.

The extended now

THE EXTENDED NOW (Memento Projects) was created in collaboration with composer Lennart Ginman, video editor Jeanette Schou Land, poet Merete Pryds Helle, goldsmith Sergei Gorioukhin and clothes designer Anne-Mette Sørensen. Thanks to Lene Roed Olesen and Annemette Willumsen.

THE EXTENDED NOW (Memento Projects) is based on a number of interview s with Associate Professor, Søren Harnow Klausen, D. Phil. Department of Philosophy and the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark, talks about time and the extended now.

Neuroscientist Professor Jesper Mogensen, Department of Psychology, University of

Copenhagen, talks about the dependence of identity on memory.
Curator Lykke L. Pedersen, the National Museum of Denmark, Research & Exhibitions, Modern Danish History, talks about how we collect memory-carrying objects in order to keep hold of the past and relate life stories, and thus create identity.

Vibeke Petersen, Head of Exhibitions & Display of Collections, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, talks about the museum as a bearer of memory and its significance in a time of increasing globalisation.
 Artist Lawrence Wiener, (ART & LANGUAGE), New York, talks about art as art – and about art as an integral part of society.
Andreas Huyssen, D. Phil, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia
University, New York, talks about how the past is present in our culture today.

Peggy Phelan, The Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama, Stanford University, talks about identity in a global context.

After the North Jutland Art Museum the exhibition will be shown at the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art.