Abstract
This research explores how language and cultural differences influence how memory is passed down from one generation to the next, based on the relationship between my grandmother, mother and myself. The impact of migration and cultural hybridity is examined in order to understand intergenerational intersections. My approach and thematic processes in my own artworks are contextualised by discussing diasporic artist Wanja Kimani’s works, her You have (not) changed series, Utopia, Self portrait, and Buttons. The workings of nostalgia are critically examined. A central theme in both Kimani’s work and my own is the notion of longing for a lost home or a past that one cannot return to. Issues of memory transmission between generations, particularly cultural or collective traumas, are analysed through objects, images and narratives that are passed down within families. The role of photography in these memory transmissions is positioned as central both in testifying to events and people in the past, and in offering creative interventions into the past, in order to understand the present. Through doing this, both Kimani and I address our sense of displacement and cultural hybridity. This study is therefore positioned within postcolonial, postmodernist and feminist paradigms.
M.Tech. (Fine Art)