In a double ‘reversal’ of the logic and function of the album, Bellou places these works in display cases and then reproduces them digitally, reminding us of the tactile qualities of the photograph and its unavoidable attrition over time.  The video projections are not simply a recording of the contents of the albums in the display cases.  Bellou repeats the same gesture, leafing through the album so as to create a narrative cohesion amongst the successive images.  As in ‘real’ albums, where the part submits to the whole, here, too, the final narration is the result of a complex process where imagination, subjective experiences, family and personal memories intermingle in order to create the sense of a life that has been imprinted on paper.

Bellou’s work invites us to think about the succession of events that make an incident or emotion worthy of being recorded, that particular moment behind or in front of the camera lens or on paper.  Her works are not merely a memoir of the other (as in the work of the same title that is in the show), but to ourselves and the ways in which we preserve our personal autobiography through infinite images.  In her works we recognize, through successive visual coherence and indefinable familiar faces and parts of a past which does not belong to us, something common.  In their repetitiousness, these images of people and places demonstrate not only the interplay of collective and personal memory, but also of History and its subjective narration (Story).

The artistic universe of Rania Bellou is composed of material fragments and traces of past relationships, of letters and dedications that recount ‘minor’ stories of love and patience, of familiar faces that stand primly in front of the camera lens.  Bellou draws out of family ‘archives’ and photograph collections personal documents of the past, in order to wander through the common places of collective memory.