The interpretations of time and memory in contemporary art

One of the main functions of art is to conserve and preserve historical human experience and help to remember them. In this context the art object plays the role as a memory trigger for the individual and collective memory. The individual, in general, traces the past of his own and the community he belongs to through visual arts. The way that the human actions taking place in space and time are represented and recorded in narrative art tradition becomes one of the main problematics of art disciplines. Social and cultural changes, effective in the motivation of conserving and preserving define the forms depicting these changes. The technological developments influencing the human history for the past two hundred years has become more rapidly and more effective. New forms of senses and thoughts appearing after this rapid change has become in the developing of new representative and conservative forms. Thus, after Modernism, the concepts of time and memory in artistic styles came to be questioned by new definitions. In the artistic tradition of 1970?s and 1990?s parallel visions the role of the art object as memory trigger takes part in a recognizable way. Conceptual art, breaking the hegamony of autonomous abstract art and known as the last defined avant ? garde movement, stil keeps on influencing contemporary art. Departing from Modernism that it fallows and with the different sensibility of the era in which we live in, contemporary art practices have taken the facts of time and memory into account with this new sensibility and comprehension. The artists of today engaging in these facts have been questioning the concepts of identity, tradition, history, myth, archieve and museum and coming up with new definitions.