#7 – Janvier / January 2025
David Horvitz
Nostalgia
David Horvitz, an extract from A snake crossing an asphalt road in California – From the exhibition Nostalgia, edition Taube, Zurich, 2023, © David Horvitz and edition Taube 2023.
Nostalgia is an ongoing artwork started in 2019 that takes the form of deleting digital photographs from my personal archive. These photographs have been made on various digital cameras since the early 2000s and stored on computers hard drives, and memory cards. Their diverse subjects range from personal moments to visual notes taking as a mnemonic device, to photos used in artworks.
The artwork is exhibited as a digital projection with each photo appearing for one minute before it is deleted forever. The number of projected (and deleted) images equal the number of minutes un exhibition is open. If no one is in the exhibition at the moment a photograph is projected, no one sees it.
The photographs become a ephemeral like the moments they originally captured.
The photographs from this book where presented and deleted between 15 October to 2022 and 21 January 2023 at my exhibition at John-Kenta Gauthier gallery in Paris. In total 16,260 digital images were projected and deleted. The exhibition was open for 16,260 minutes.
Metadata indicating time and date are presented along with memories of the photographs. If the camera was not set or if there was a malfunction, that data might not reflect the actual time of the moment of the photograph.
—David Horvitz