Memory and Medium: Identity Explored at the ECC Awards Shortlist in Venice

The European Cultural Centre’s Palazzo Mora, a 16th-century structure, serves as a fitting backdrop for identity exploration at this year’s ECC Awards exhibition. The shortlist, on view until November 26, highlights ten finalists whose works depict identity as both personal and collective.

One standout piece, Chromatic Tides (2023) by Sofia Malandraki, merges video projection with woven tapestries. The tapestries, crafted from salvaged fishing nets dyed in blue and orange gradients, evoke the Mediterranean and its histories. In her video, Malandraki overlays archival footage from her family’s home in Crete with drone shots of eroded coastlines. "I wanted to confront how landscapes mark and unmark us," she stated during the opening event. This blend of analogue fiber art and digital technology recurs among the finalists.

Another highlight is Ibrahim Okoro’s Reverbs (2022), a mixed-media installation that excavates diasporic identity through sound and sculpture. Okoro constructed a circular room lined with resonant bronze panels etched with Yoruba proverbs. Inside, visitors are enveloped by a low-frequency soundscape of Lagos market recordings layered with digitally altered excerpts of Okoro’s voice. "The space becomes a translator of baselines," remarked Dr. Nadia Bassano, guest curator and lecturer at the University of Bologna.

The ECC’s curatorial guide describes the exhibition as "revealing the intersectional narratives of our times." However, the term risks dilution when applied too broadly. While the catalogue connects the works through a shared dialogue of identities, no single thread ties them together. Instead, the exhibition functions as an episodic anthology, with each piece generating its own grammar for exploring identity.

Historical memory is central to Yuko Tamura’s Encoded Soil (2023), which features 132 clay tablets impressed with QR codes. Scanning each leads to oral histories, some recorded by Tamura and others sourced from Fukushima archives. The mundane domestic settings described in these audio excerpts—frying fish or folding clothes—become fragile against Fukushima’s disrupted landscapes. Tamura embraces the cracks and crumbles in the clay, allowing it to demonstrate its memory of stress and moisture.

In the second-floor gallery, the tension between material and metaphor intensifies. Lars Eiken’s Fragment No Longer (2023) suspends shredded medical records in resin blocks, creating objects that hover between sculpture and artifact. The records, sourced from Eiken’s late father’s psychiatric institution, are indiscernible as text but legible as trauma. They are exhibited alongside a 1970 sketchbook found among his father’s belongings, pages barely touched yet present as potential. Eiken’s work, according to the ECC’s Giulia Marinelli, "invites us to consider not only what we leave behind but also what we intentionally obscure."

Yet the exhibition has moments of overreach. A digital VR piece by Jun-Ho Kim, titled Persona Algorithm (2023), claims to provide viewers with "an entirely new sense of their digital self." Although technically seamless, it conflates technological novelty with depth. While it raises questions about algorithmic distortions of identity, its execution lacks the emotional resonance found in Malandraki’s handwoven nets or Eiken’s resin-encased fragments.

The shortlist also features Tayeona Hermance’s Inheritance Codes (2021-2023), a series of large-scale cyanotype prints suspended from the ceiling. Each print, made using treated textiles from her grandmother, incorporates stitched outlines of migration routes traced from U.S. census data. Hermance’s choice to both conceal and reveal details—some stitches skipping major cities, others fading into the fabric’s folds—underscores the contradictions of memory as both preservation and omission.

The European Cultural Centre initiated its awards program in 2018, focusing on work that engages with global challenges while rooted in local specificity. This year’s shortlist reflects a growing trend toward hybrid practices that blend traditional craft with digital processes and autobiographical urgency. Although the exhibition lacks a cohesive narrative, its strength lies in fragmentation. Each piece asserts the idiosyncratic ways identity resists being pinned down.

The ECC Awards shortlist exhibition will remain open at Palazzo Mora, Venice, until November 26, 2023.