Ivona Tau Explores Memory and AI in Somewhere, Something Shines exhibition
We are excited to share that our artist Ivona Tau is an exhibiting artist in Somewhere, Something Shines, alongside Anna Fraire at Galerie Met. Exploring the fluid and changing nature of memory, Somewhere, Something Shines brings together Fraire’s physical collages and Tau’s AI reinterpretations of archival works. Ivona Tau’s pieces transform personal history through machine learning by training neural networks on old family photographs and film. The exhibition opens on March 14 and runs until April.
Ivona Tau, After-school social club, 2025
A family album is more than a collection of images—it is a vessel of memory, a silent witness to lives once lived, relationships formed, and moments that shaped generations. Some memories remain vivid, while others fade into fragments, altered by time, emotion, and forgetting. In Somewhere, Something Shines, Anna Fraire and Ivona Tau engage with these traces of the past, transforming their family archives through distinct yet complementary approaches. Fraire reconstructs memory through physical collage, incorporating photographs with intimate artifacts, while Tau entrusts artificial intelligence to reinterpret her family’s history, training neural networks on archival images and film. Their works embody the tension between holding onto the past and allowing it to evolve, revealing how remembrance is not static but continuously reshaped by time, technology, and perception.
Anna Fraire approaches memory as a layered and evolving process. In her series Family Album / Album di Famiglia, she reconfigures old family photographs by combining them with personal documents, letters, postcards, and school reports. These elements intertwine in compositions that do not reconstruct her family’s history but rather explore the fluidity of memory. Fraire’s work highlights how memory is not an ordered archive but a shifting terrain where past and present, personal experience and testimony, constantly blur.
Ivona, Tau Bird cherry blossoms in the summer of 1967, 2025
Her process embraces imperfection and transformation, demonstrating that memory is not about restoring the past but engaging with its remnants. By working with inherited materials and disrupting traditional photographic storytelling, she challenges the notion of history as something fixed. Instead, her compositions invite viewers to consider how memory functions beyond mere documentation, existing in layers of meaning that shift over time. Through the family archive she works with, Fraire explores the interplay between presence and absence, joy and hurt. Transcending the personal, she traces the connections between us and our emotional legacies, opening up new perspectives on what is inherited and reinterpreted across generations.
Ivona Tau, working at the intersection of photography and artificial intelligence, explores memory through digital reconstruction. In her series My Grandmother’s Memories, she processes a collection of negatives and 8mm film footage taken by her grandfather in the 1960s and 1980s, training AI models to reinterpret these archival images. The AI-generated results— faces that resemble family members but are never exact, moments that feel real yet remain elusive—evoke the fragility of memory and its tendency to blur over time. Her approach reflects the way recollection is unstable, subject to distortion, and shaped by both human perception and technological mediation.
Ivona Tau, Castles of Antakalnis, 2025
Tau’s work extends beyond her grandmother’s memories to broader reflections on the impermanence of personal history. As her grandmother experienced memory loss—mistaking loved ones, inhabiting a past that no one else could see—Tau became fascinated by how memory fragments and reshapes itself. AI’s generative glitches—its distortions, shifting forms, and fluid reconstructions—mirror this process, highlighting the instability of remembrance. Her works, including After-School Social Club and Longing for an Embrace, Longing for a Gaze, explore how artificial intelligence can serve as both an archival tool and a metaphor for the ways memory is reconstructed through personal and technological lenses.
Through Fraire’s tangible, layered assemblages and Tau’s digital reinterpretations, Somewhere, Something Shines reveals
memory as an active, ever-changing force. Whether through the physical remnants of personal history or AI’s generative reimagining, both artists expose how remembrance is shaped by materiality, perception, and time. Their works question the boundaries between preservation and reinvention, personal and universal, nostalgia and transformation. In an era when digital technology increasingly mediates how we remember, this exhibition serves as a reflection on the fragile, fluid nature of memory—one that is always shifting, always becoming, always shining in unexpected ways.
Somewhere, Something Shines
Anna Fraire, Ivona Tau
Opening: March 14, 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: March 15 – April 05, 2025
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Collaborator: Fellowship
Ivona Tau, My Grandmother’s Memories, 2025
Anna Fraire:
Anna Fraire is an art photographer with a background in architecture. She studied at Berlin’s Neue Schule für Fotografie, where she developed her experimental approach to photography. Her work explores a wide range of personal themes, from womanhood and body image to perception, memory and emotional inheritance. Often incorporating mixed media, analogue photography and digital manipulation, she combines unconventional tools and materials to create images that convey a sense of depth and complexity, encouraging viewers to question their own perceptions of reality. Her work has been exhibited internationally in various shows including Signs of Impermanence at Jinny Gallery in Tokyo (April 2023), International Festival For Alternative Photography at Multimedia Center Mala Stanica in Skopje (July 2023), and StadtWandel at Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin (February 2021). She has been featured in several publications, including Art Doc Magazine (September 2023, September 2020), Yogurt Magazine (Quarantine Flavour, June 2020), and was shortlisted for Fotoroom Vasli Souza Edition in 2019.
Ivona Tau:
Ivona Tau is a new media artist from Vilnius, Lithuania, who combines code, deep neural networks, and personal memories embedded in photography. Her goal is to find and evoke emotions through artificially intelligent tools. Working at the intersection of photography and machine learning, Tau explores how AI reinterprets visual memory, capturing the tension between human perception and algorithmic reconstruction. Her practice is rooted in the materiality of photographic archives, using generative models to distort, reshape, and reimagine images, revealing the imperfections and fluidity of recollection. By training her own models on personal datasets, she maintains control over the aesthetic and conceptual direction of her work. Tau’s work has been exhibited widely, including Art Basel Miami Beach, SCOPE, CAFA, Art Week Shenzhen, Vellum, Bitforms New York, Venus Over Manhattan, The House of Fine Art, Bright Moments Berlin, Christie’s New York and Sotheby’s New York. Her work has been acquired by ZMK Museum of Contemporary Art in Germany & Francisco Carolinum Linz in Austria.