Disrupting the Image, Altering Memory

Lorna Bauer and Marwan Sekkat meet at the threshold of the visible. Though their backgrounds and mediums are distinct, their practices share a common inquiry into the image, its materiality, its capacity to carry a fragmented, unstable, and shifting memory. Through photography, digital glitch, installation, or layered processes, they approach territory as a palimpsest inscribed with invisible narratives, latent inheritances, and disturbances waiting to be revealed.

In Yellow Flowers RGB separation (Baldwin) (2024), Lorna Bauer photographs a field of tansy using a chromogenic technique that separates the red, green, and blue light channels. The result is a vibrant, split, and almost unstable image, where contours tremble and blend. This delicate approach disrupts our perception. What once appeared fixed becomes mobile; what was sharp becomes spectral. Here, nature is not documented but altered, transformed into a sensitive surface where color operates as diffuse memory. It becomes a visual language for disorientation, uncertainty, and perhaps a certain loss of grounding in reality.

In dialogue, La porte, Sbata (2025) by Marwan Sekkat adopts a different yet equally disorienting formal strategy. Using datamoshing, he deconstructs an image of a traditional door, a recurring motif in his work, allowing pixels, textures, and digital errors to collide. Within a vortex of liquid colors, a geometric trace remains visible: a star, a frame, an architectural form evoking a threshold or boundary. This tension between representation and saturation gives the piece a powerful visual and symbolic intensity, evoking the complexity of an identity in motion, fractured between multiple territories: Morocco, Quebec, digital realms.

The convergence between these two artists lies in this friction, this disturbance of the image. For both Marwan and Lorna, visual alteration is not a glitch, it is a method, a language. Glitching, distortion, color overload, and erasure become signs of a territory that resists capture. They expose the cracks in dominant narratives, the absences in representations, the gaps in the archive.

Within Mémoire de l’avenir 2025, their duo questions the role of images in shaping collective memory. How do we represent what slips away? How can we see what has never been shown? Their works compel us to slow down, to accept blur and displacement as pathways to another kind of knowing. An invitation to look again at what we thought we understood.

Text by the AUM team