The Reminiscence Bump

Omari Douglin, Isa Genzken, Douglas Gordon, Talisa Lallai, Gowoon Lee – in collaboration with Super Super Markt

Info: To return and escape and return and escape again. At the tail-end of 2023, a year that, despite its continued proximity, seems to have taken place decades ago, I published an essay titled The Reminiscence Bump. The title of that text, now the title of this exhibition, refers to the well-documented tendency for adults to preserve a disproportionate number of memories originating in adolescence and early adulthood. Were you to trace your life-span retrieval curve, a graph visualising the quantity of autobiographical memories encoded at various ages, you would find within the smooth waves of the line three distinct stages of life: childhood amnesia, a shallow incline from birth to age five; the reminiscence bump, an exaggerated peak nestled between the teens and mid-twenties; and a protracted period of forgetting, articulated through an inevitable decline from the thirties to the present, when the recency effect takes hold. For reasons that remain contested, it is within that central stage, that essential yet terrifying realm of adolescence, that life imprints itself upon us with the most pressure. Perhaps it’s because, during those developmental years, we feel the world more keenly. Perhaps it’s because we’re learning what it is to feel. Or perhaps it’s because we know we’ll need to feel that way in the future. (…)