Nadia Koldaeva

MORE as part of the MEMORY Oversaturated project

Nadia Koldaeva

MORE as part of the MEMORY Oversaturated project

2024–2026

Installation

MAMM Collection

The project was implemented with the support of Svody [Vaults] Art Production Centre

The advent of smartphones with colossal memory capacities and the creation of cloud storage should have helped people create stable digital repositories of memories. However, the nearly limitless possibilities for storing photos have led to their excessive accumulation. As before, important moments in life deserve to be photographed, but compared to the past, their range has expanded significantly. What events, objects and phenomena have become commonplace in photo feeds today?

Nadia Koldaeva began her study of mobile photo galleries, MEMORY Oversaturated, in 2024 and it is still ongoing. Since then she has interviewed over 50 people aged 7 to 65 from Russia, Belarus, the USA, France, Germany, and other countries. Project participants sent the artist screenshots of their mobile photo galleries. The collected material was used to explore collective digital memory – recognising recurring images and what is considered beautiful, important, and worthy of remembering. By manually sorting through the images, Nadia Koldaeva created a processed archive, which forms the basis of the installation.

Also on display at the exhibition is the artist’s book, a kind of research diary. It is shown in a display case.

Nadia Koldaeva 

MEMORY Oversaturated

2024

Artist’s book 

MAMM collection

The multi-part archive folder MEMORY Oversaturated is a kind of research diary. It contains participant questionnaires (you can view them in more detail on the touchpad), the photo book Fragments[28], and the zine The multi-part archive folder MEMORY oversaturated is a kind of research diary. It contains participant questionnaires (you can view them in more detail on the touchpad), the photo book Fragments[28], and the zine Fragility.

Fragments[28] features photographs capturing the most popular scenes from the collected mobile galleries (for example a beach vacation, dog walks, photographs of exhibits). Enlarged screenshots of the photo feeds are also displayed in the showcase. They contain empty squares – images that failed to load and were effectively lost. The white squares where the images should have been eloquently testify to the fragility of digital memory. This is the theme of the zine Fragility.