Kaya Fraser presents Give us a Smile — a moving image installation exploring the everyday ways we memorialise each other’s lives.
The everyday and working class homes as sites of archive, memory, place and identity are reoccurring themes in Kaya Fraser’s practice. Working with still and video cameras inherited from her family, she combines a documentary approach with attention to the beauty residing in the everyday.
In her new work for Satellites, Kaya documents the experience of grief and celebrates the role of her mother as family archivist.
Staying in her childhood home over Christmas 2023, Fraser noticed the way her mother had carefully curated artefacts in every room.
From ‘The Who’ merch to bric-a-brac; stuffed toys to chopping boards; every object was either a reminder of the life her mother had built with the artist’s late stepfather or gifts from a community that had rallied around to support a mourning widow and mother.
Fraser has used found footage made by her stepfather, as well as new panoramic footage she created using his old Samsung Camcorder to create a two channel video installation including a display of objects. Give us a Smile is an everyday archive of Fraser’s working class home — as a site for grief, but also renewal.
Interpretation material: written | audio
Accompanying essay by Hayley Jane Dawson: written | audio
Kaya Fraser’s exhibition was part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2024, and represents the final presentation by the 2023 cohort including exhibitions by: Matty Rimmer, Rabindranath X Bhose and Thomas Abercromby, ahead of the presentation of work from the 2024 cohort of Satellites artists later in the year.
Satellites is Collective’s development programme for emergent creative practitioners based in Scotland. Through discussions, workshops, events, retreats and public presentations of new work, artists are invited to engage critically with each other in a programme specifically developed to support them at a pivotal point in their practice.
Image: Kaya Fraser, Give us a Smile (detail)