PORTFOLIO - Ingrid Dorner: Crossed memories

Stories
- 13 February 2020

by Jean-baptiste Gauvin

In her series EDIT, the artist probes her past by manipulating her grandmother’s negatives and her own production. She has created a ghostly, oneiric body of work that explores identity and memory.

Ingrid Dorner has practiced photography since she was a teenager. However, she didn’t show her images to anyone for a long time, preferring stage acting as a form of artistic expression. It was only recently that she decided to use photography as the medium of her emotions, questions, and impressions about the mystery surrounding some members of her family. “I’m very interested in the idea of trauma and how one experiences the trauma of one’s ancestors, the transmission of trauma,” explains Ingrid Dorner.

She thus took hold of the negatives of photographs taken by her grandmother Edith, who was known in her family as a poor photographer in the sense that she had a lot of missed shots. She even earned the nickname of “Blurry Granny.” Paradoxically, her “missed” shots came to serve as raw material for the work of Ingrid Dorner who marvels at the beauty of these blurry images. “My grandmother was a whimsical personality, and we got along fabulously,” recalls the artist.

Ingrid Dorner superimposed her grandmother’s negatives on her own, and more specifically those she hand’t used. In other words, she channeled scrap material from her own work into this project. Through the superimposition of these two sets of negatives, Ingrid Dorner blends two worldviews and two eras: she follows in her grandmother’s footsteps while shaking up the fixedness of the original shots. By creatively using material frozen in time, she interrupts the cycle of oblivion surrounding it, and breathes new life into her images, even while replenishing and vivifying the act of remembrance. She is thus able to delve with greater intensity into the enigma of lineage.