In response to the history and domestic setting of the Roedde House—built in 1893 and originally home to the family of Gustav Roedde, one of Vancouver’s first bookbinders—artists Diyan Achjadi and Cindy Mochizuki mark and inscribe the Roedde House Museum with reimagined narratives. The artists each consider an element of the museum’s print history, including the Roedde’s successful printing business and the decorative arts typical of the late 19th century. Inserting their artworks within the period rooms, the artists interrupt the museum’s dominant story of a middle-class European immigrant family and speak to Canada’s difficult colonial history, which continues to shape the nation’s present.

Memories of the Future III features an installation of prints and a collection of textiles by Achjadi and a new experimental dance film by Mochizuki that collapse fact and fiction and interweave official and counter histories. This exhibition is the third in a series of projects inviting contemporary artists to create artworks in response to the traditional stories told by historic house museums in Canada. Through a range of mediums and approaches these site-specific interventions explore the layered and hidden stories of our social and material histories. Using the visual language of the present and speculating on possibilities for the future, memories of the distant past are newly exposed, interpreted and remembered.

Memories of the Future borrows its title from a controversial collection of essays by Ukrainian-born writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Written in the 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky’s subversive essays were censored by Soviet authorities, and it was only after his death that his writing was republished to critical acclaim. As the reference suggests, Memories of the Future offers a form of cultural excavation that attempts to uncover buried stories and forgotten histories.