Memory Concrete

Exhibition: Photo print, video installation and original copies of Polaroids and contact sheet print

Concrete builds homes, communities, and the routines of everyday life. It can also erase them.

Memory Concrete grows out of Lane 138, Changyang Road, a photography project initiated in 2021 during the final months before the demolition of a residential neighborhood in Shanghai. What began as an attempt to make portraits of residents before they moved away gradually became something else: a process of reconnecting with people who had lived alongside one another for years, yet remained partially unknown to each other.

This exhibition shifts its attention away from the event of demolition itself and toward what continues afterward.

Alongside photographs from the original project, Memory Concrete includes personal objects preserved by former residents and the video installation After July 23rd: One Video Call. Together, these works trace the ways memories, relationships, and fragments of everyday life continue to circulate after a place has disappeared.

The title reflects a contradiction. Concrete was the material that once held this community together; it was also the material used to seal doors, cover windows, and erase visible traces of its existence. Yet while buildings can be removed, the connections formed within them are often more difficult to erase.

For many former residents, Lane 138 no longer exists as a physical address. It survives instead through photographs, objects, conversations, and shared memories carried elsewhere. This exhibition brings together some of those fragments—not as a reconstruction of a lost place, but as an exploration of how people continue to remain connected after the spaces that once connected them are gone.

Nov. 2022 @ Kubrick Bookstore