Rituals of Remembrance

Geoffrey Cheung’s photo-based practice explores the ways we hold and transform memories and how they inform our sense of self. Inherited, intergenerational memories, such as postmemories, can often impede our efforts to actively shape our identities and to find belonging. In recognition of this, Cheung’s thesis explores how rituals facilitate the reshaping of memory and how they can become an adaptive tool to renegotiate the past with the present. Photographs, photo-objects, and installations comprise this thesis which investigates how the act of layering—of materials like wax, organic matter, and digital processes—overtop photographic images are reflections of his own memory rituals. His research examines how such material strategies, which obscure and occlude the image plane, can speak of the erosion of memory and invite viewers to reconsider their own agency in memory transformation. Cheung’s inquiries lead him to engage with Marianne Hirsch and Roland Barthes who both explore the role of photography and image technologies in the formation and propagation of cultural memories. Obfuscation and occlusion are also discussed in the context of Karen Barad and Judith Halberstam who both suggest non-productivity and failure as strategies for recontextualizing identity and the past. In this way, Cheung proposes rituals of remembrance as a strategy for renewal whereby narratives can be rewritten, opening up space for new relationships with the histories we carry.