Screening memory : the prosthetic images of Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan, a Canadian of Armenian origin, is a prolific filmmaker and visual artist, having created a number of feature films, short films, video installations, and more. His extensive, dense, and multifaceted oeuvre, which delves into questions of heritage, alienation, loss, family, and traumatic history, has continually focused on the relationship between image and memory.

While cinema and memory are inextricably bound (films register time, and filmic images are inscribed into our memories), Egoyan's work takes up this assumption, questioning and complicating the nature of the relationship. Whether it is the relation between memory and audiovisual technology, memory and the Armenian Catastrophe, or memory and diaspora, it is by continually constructing and deconstructing the foundations of the image that these connections emerge. It is thus in these obsessive and repetitive dynamics that Egoyan creates and produces images, at once artificial and fragile, as prostheses of memory.