LOOKING FOR LARA

Cecilia Westerberg takes Boris Pasternak’s partly autobiographical novel Dr. Zhivago as her point of departure and works with different aspects of displacement in the individual and collective memory.

In the first part of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg takes her starting point in a number of interviews, with people who have seen the classical film Dr. Zhivago from 1965. Westerberg examines, through simple questions about which scenes, figures or things that has made the greatest impression, how our memory of Dr. Zhivago is part of our collective image-bank and therefore collective memory. And at the same time is an entirely different part of our individual memory.

In the first room of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg is showing oil paintings with scenes from Dr. Zhivago. The scenes are chosen partly from the answers from the interviews.
In the second room of the exhibition Cecilia Westerberg takes her point of departure in her own journey to Russia and focuses on the interaction between fiction and reality.

In Spring 2008 Cecilia Westerberg traveled to Peredelkino, where Boris Pasternak lived and wrote the book Dr. Zhivago. In this part of the exhibition Westerberg once again focuses on how fiction meets reality. This time though, it’s through her own experience of the odyssey from (film) fiction to reality – and finally her meeting with Russia. Westerberg especially focuses on her experience of the Americanized film version of Dr. Zhivago and a contemporary Russia year 2008.