Gallery EXIT presents ‘Their Memories’ by Daphné MANDEL, featuring a new series of works by the Hong Kong-based French artist. Positioning herself as an observer, for many years MANDEL has been engaging with her adopted city’s past. Exploring villages in the New Territories and collecting stories from local villagers whose lifestyle is on the brink of disappearing, she explores the themes of pattern and repetition versus singularity and uniqueness through the narratives of rural life and industrial heritage.
 
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is greeted by a long row of small paintings from the Their Memories series. Seen from a distance, these paintings drawn from formal family portraits, photographs of casual friends and family gatherings and occasions, weekend excursions and travels abroad form a repetitive pattern of shapes, shades of sepia, browns and greys, evoking a cycle of lives of a people who have left their rural village homes and their memories behind. Only when scrutinised up close do the individual stories become discernible. As the artist wanders around abandoned homes in rural villages, she often comes across photo albums that have survived several decades in a decaying and humid structure, the photographs within turned into a palette of browns, sepia, pinks and yellows. Time, material deterioration, the artist’s intervention and act of painting, transform the ephemeral images into the abstraction of memory.

Exhibition opening: 3-5pm, Saturday, 30 November

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen