Martina Sauter | Morgaine Schäfer
Constructed Memory
RizzutoGallery is pleased to present Constructed Memory, an exhibition that brings together two influential photographers on the German art scene, Martina Sauter and Morgaine Schäfer, both Masters of Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. They share a method rather than a style: each begins with images they didn't take—a film frame or a slide from their father—and reconstructs them in a fabricated rather than inherited memory.
The exhibition will open on Saturday, October 3, 2026, at 6:00 PM at the Palermo location at Via Maletto 5, and will remain open to the public until November 28—Tuesday to Saturday, 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM.
Memory as Fabrication
Despite their diverse sources and methods, Sauter and Schäfer share a radical stance: memory is not inherited, it is constructed. Both begin with a pre-existing image—a film still or a familiar slide—that is not yet an art photograph, but a trace, a document, a relic. The artistic gesture consists in extracting this trace from the archive (film or home) and subjecting it to a process of reworking: collage, rephotography, enlargement, editing.
In both cases, the photographic medium is exposed in its conditions of production and its viewing devices. The frame, the support, the screen, the film grain become elements as significant as the subject represented. And in both cases, the final image—suspended between fiction and reality, memory and invention—questions the viewer about the very nature of what we call memory.
