Memory games are commonly marketed as cognitive tools, to encourage children to develop their logical and sequential skills. Games themselves often simulate our daily life, they teach children to order the world and to adhere to the order of the world, to perform within its institutions. In this exhibition however, the artists co-opt the memory game – freeing it from its organised structures to form an alternate engagement with the world, one that is playful, absurd, atemporal, at times surreal or disorderly, imbued with sentiment and emotive storytelling.
French sociologist Roger Caillois defines a game as an activity that must adhere to five characteristics, one being that it is fictitious: “it is accompanied by the awareness of a different reality.” Exhibiting artists build narratives that explore familial archives and the environments of childhood: the playground, the toy, the costume and the rhyme. They return to a time that sits outside of institutional structures and administrative bureaucracies to imagine an alternative arena that challenges how we might exist within the world today.