“space of a space reminiscing” by Ira Grünberger

Perhaps a house to grow up in is the framework for us being cast into the world. When returning to that house is no longer possible, it persists to live on within our imagination, haunting our dreams and beckoning us to revisit our past. When a house transforms, so does our memory. How do the materials that sustain our memories remember themselves? Can we re-inhabit a space through imagining?

space of a space reminiscing (2022-2023) is a material-based research by Ira Grünberger into the relation of matter and space resulting in a site–specific installation, accompanied by a visual and written publication. Memory surfaces through photographic processes and their materiality slowly dissolves. A blueprint is transformed into a physical being and takes its own shape. In this sense, image, house and memory are built spaces, all carrying the ability to imprint on one another. Whoever enters this territory is faced with the potential of materials functioning as vessels to resolve embodied trauma. In the installation, vinegar drips from a copper piping onto a metal plate and with time dissolves the image of a remembered house. The steel frames are based on the floorplans of that house, hand drawn by the artist’s father, and carry engraved glass and a photograph with imprints of rust. Two ceramic tiles display the same floorplans using cyanotype, a photographic process containing iron salts, traditionally used to create blueprints in architecture. One of the tiles has been exposed to a high temperature, which made its iron particles rust and its colour turn from blue to orange.

Ira Grünberger is an interdisciplinary artist with a strong background in photography. They work across the mediums of photography and installation to explore the interconnectedness and temporality of human and non-human, and how their memory transcends and materializes in space. Photography, sculpture and writing are explored as tools to let memory surface and materialize, leading to a collaborative exploration of materials used in construction such as metal, glass, or clay. The research comes together in spatial re- and deconstructions where elemental and image-based processes are combined. In doing so, they aim to bend solid frameworks into something more palpable.

Ira Grünberger is presented by Ieva Maslinskaitė.

Ieva Maslinskaitė is part of »Guest Room: Michael Famighetti«.

Check out her Artist Feature In a Pupa.