MEMORY FLOW
Mustafa El Husseiny  @ Karim Francis Gallery

 

If past events could not be remembered, it would be impossible for languages, relations or personal identity to develop.

 

The paradigm of human memory has been an unwavering contemplation for Mustafa El Husseiny since he was a young adult. The inability to recall events or memories, or stashing life in easily destructible hard discs, irked El Husseiny into experimenting with map projects; through which he can render all life events traceable.

 

Through the ‘Paper Trail’ exhibition in 2017, El Husseiny put forward the first series of map projects that he drew during his military service from January 2015 till March 2016. The summary of that experience inspired him to list and record the memories of three members of his family in the form of virtual maps.

 

The senses detect information from the world around us and first enter the sensory memory, which stores a brief impression of the detected stimuli. The sensory stores constantly receive information, but most of this information is not attended to and remains in memory very briefly.

 

Relying on old distorted images, spoken narratives, and his memory alone; El Husseiny started digging into the roots of his maternal and paternal families that date back to the 1950s. Coming to the conclusion that his mother and father share the same family tree, he started tracking their whereabouts at different points of history, as well as interconnecting their memories.

 

Holding onto memories he never wishes to forget, El Husseiny drew more than 40 people from his family and friends. Wishing to engrave the memory of all those who influenced his life greatly. Using mixed media on cardboard, El Husseiny found a way to encapsulate the menagerie that is the human memory; making ‘Memory Flow’ emulate a recollection process that pieces together fragments of life into a beautifully composed jigsaw puzzle.