Brigitte Konyen: Between Fact and Fiction
© Brigitte Konyen
The VASA exhibition by Brigitte Konyen entitled “Between Fact and Fiction” contains four portfolios: Snapshots, Family Album, Enfance (childhood) and All or Nothing. Her work is a mixture of collage, image manipulation and family album.
Konyen states that her reconstruction of her family history is a play between facts understood as historical and the fiction of her creation. She asks us to connect various elements of photographs reconstructed into historical collages, a family album showing images of her and her father (a fictional construction) and another set of family photographs viewed through pergamin interleaving filtering out a clear view of the past. In the end the viewer is given a glimpse of an exhibition display that refers to a personal genealogy reconstructing her history of unfilled loves and “whose who”; a construction of fictional relationships between her and “pop” stars, teenage dreams and longings for love. Viewed as individual series the exhibition loses its impact and focus. Seen collectively they refer to an organized whole whose structural base provides the foundation to a constructed history or herstory.
Her story is built upon falsehoods and manipulated relationships. All history(s) are constructions providing a point of view that is either partially true or built upon exclusions and inclusions. The deconstruction of any history reveals a narrative of benefit to the storyteller while marginalizing the histories of others. There are many histories, many narratives and many truths. Official histories are not the histories of everyone. Family histories tell partial stories based on some fact and passed down narratives. The fact that Konyen builds upon is the photograph. The photograph as record of a moment passed.
Family histories are a mixture of facts (Uncle Joe was born on this date at this location) and fictions telling different stories: we were all happy at the family picnic or here we are at the Brandenburg Tor enjoying our trip together. For any of this to make sense a narrative accompanies historical objects: photographs, artifacts and things. It is in this narrative, no matter how short or detailed, that a history is constructed upon. A statue of a solider tells us nothing without its historical cultural narrative. Social and cultural narratives are connected to other narratives forming a grand story providing a foundation to understanding one’s identity and place in “a” history. It is a history built upon facts and fiction, benefit and power. The location of self in a family or a broader social-cultural-economic structure forms a perspective on framing possibilities and realities. In this case, identities are fabricated to inform the individual of their place in history and social frameworks.
The family photo album is a construction that creates a history and location. There are rituals, ceremonies, and the packaging of events: birth, the wedding, death and in many cases the fictional life of the maker, their connections and relationships. What is left out or removed from the album is as significant as what is included.
The family photo album, similar to the selected photos on the shelf or found in the wallet, acts as an historical confirmation of who we are and where we have been. The album in particular is a fiction, telling a story that may be partially true or a complete fiction. The photos may be accurate in their depiction, this is uncle Joe, but the narrative surrounding the images in the book or on the page is a story constructed out of selected memories and points in history. The album is made with a purpose and audience in mind. It serves both as a tale and as a wish taking its place next to others, to be taken only when needed for reflection and the confirmation of self. Histories, if they are understood as mirrors, are as clear as the distortion believed to be reflecting the world within it. Fact and fiction are elusive. The family is only what we select to remember and forget.
The work included in this exhibition by Brigitte Konyen offers the reader (through images read as texts) the efforts to construct and reconstruct a family and to place one’s self in it. In a very sense she is speaking to all of us who wish for the family that never was but imagined. Images of the family influenced by popular media of the 1950s – 60s (Father Knows Best, All in the Family) present the picture-perfect family, one to be modeled.
I find two series of work in the exhibition that function in similar but in different ways:" Snapshots" and "Enfance". “Snapshots” are collages built out of disembodied photographs of mainly woman. The resulting image reconstructs partially a human form, never completing the image. The images may emblematically refer to the constructive nature of a collective person (the collage builds the person) forming the self. Whereas in “Enfance” Konyen constructs a factious family album, building a history with her father who was never part of that history (at least not in image). On the pages of the album she inserts images of her father and herself in a world that never existed. What appears to be fact – photographic evidence – is all a lie. Like all photographs and autobiographical events that are not what they seem. As Brigitte Konyen suggests in her exhibition statement: “autobiographical art can operate as an apparatus for experimental relational viewing, as a powerful catalyst whereby viewers draw upon their own life stories to connect with the work.” This connection is a fiction by nature, a projection of the self into another’s desire.
© Roberto Muffoletto, 2019