Nova Contemporary is pleased to present a solo booth of works by Pam Virada for Liste Art Fair Basel 2024. Each piece in this cycle functions as a mnemonic apparatus, exploring the elusive and intangible nature of time and memory.
Virada uses the domestic as a repository for the ephemeral, shifting, and forsaken. She transforms one household object into another, reconstructing found trays into candle sconces. The titles and imagery of these works are derived from Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s ‘seasonal’ pictures, in which the changing seasons are used as a metaphor for the cyclical rhythms and transitions of family dynamics, aging, and generational change. As an artist long interested in lineal constellations and her identity within the Chinese-Thai diaspora, Virada’s practice is deeply connected to Ozu’s canonical approach. Appropriating images from his films, she sutures different states of belonging and remembering, elevating the domestic into a realm of heightened reflection. She negates the static, approaching the family as a recurring and interconnected system akin to changing weather patterns.
Ambiguous chronology appears again in a three-part installation, which features chains of bead and clay trickling down into empty wine glasses. The work implies a concluded gathering of the past. Yet, the spine-like sequences allude to a lingering corporeal presence, like remnants of the spectral or ancestral. This notion of what remains continues in a twin pair of windows at the front of the booth. Supernatural imagery is projected onto both screens, featuring looped videos of moving light against an urban landscape. The work hints at the magical within the mundane, and probes tensions between the internal and external. Though the viewer is positioned as a voyeur, these partitions also function as objects of intimacy and protection, made to prevent outsiders from seeing what lies within. The suspenseful act of exposure is made palpable by the material of window film, as if the video can be peeled away like residual sediment, in the same way tree bark or a roll of photographic film can be stripped or unveiled. This visceral tactility mirrors Walter Benjamin’s ideas on projection and Phantasmagoria, the theatrical spectacle of fantastical images popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Benjamin viewed phantasmagoria as emblematic of modernity's allure, where mass media and technology conjure an illusory world, supplanting and even replacing carnal pleasures.
In this proposed presentation, Virada demonstrates the inextricable relationship between medium and meaning in her practice, as informed by the cinematic and temporal. She forms an imaginative world of memory and nostalgia: we simultaneously engage in a retrieval of what has been lost but found, and are reminded that what we see and experience will disappear again and be interpreted in a different construction of remembrance and reconciliation.
