Trapped in a loop, 2014
Animation, HD, color, no sound
Loop
Central to this piece are the questions: Do our memories inform our identities? If so, what about incomplete memories, lost memories or those forcefully shut down? If I can’t recall large parts of my life, do I even have an identity? My father is a symbol of a lost period — for me personally, for him as he lost his future at a young age and for the country during wartime. I do not have any moving images of my father, and wanted to animate him, bring him back to life somehow. I chose to make a hand drawn, frame by frame animation. I started with a familiar photograph of him, and tried to make him blink, or move one of his limbs. I made tens of drawings of him, but with each next drawing, I was moved further away from the thruth – his likeness.
This repetitive animation of my father mirrors the many times I have told and re-told the same stories about him, to the point where they feel distant and impersonal after awhile. I evoke the life of my father and his physicality through the animation, reviving him, but only in the confines of a looped movement symbolic of my limited memory and the passing of time.
