Ivona Tau
Lithuania
Artist Statement
Description
Exploring family albums through the lens of memory loss, this project is derived from my personal photography archive spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. Later in life, my mother experienced dementia, and her ensuing memory loss forms the heart of this work, my interpretation of how she perceived reality, often reliving her childhood. In this narrative, generations blend as her children’s memories intertwine with her own, allowing past and present to collapse into one. This project is a reconstruction of a past that exists somewhere between reality and imagination. It began with scanning dozens of old negatives that my grandfather shot in the 1960s and 1970s on Soviet cameras like the Zenit, many of which were never printed. I took hold of them after he passed away, as my family was cleaning his apartment, and uncovered a forgotten archive of everyday life: my grandmother with her two children (my mother and my aunt), vacations, skiing trips, quiet moments at home, and cityscapes of Vilnius, Riga, Zakopane, Nida, and Trakai.
Process
In a way, this archive is not just a record of family life but also a recording of my grandmother’s memories, of her, through her, and around her. She was always present, either as a subject or a witness, living through each of these moments. But in the last decade of her life, after a car accident, she suffered from memory loss, most likely linked to dementia or Alzheimer’s. She no longer recognized us, mistook my mother for her sister, and lived in a version of the past that only she could see. I was both heartbroken and fascinated by the world she inhabited.This project is a homage to her and her memories, both those that remained and those that faded. It explores how AI, like memory, distorts and reconstructs the past, offering glimpses into a world that is deeply personal yet ultimately unknowable. More images from the series are available to see: https://daily.xyz/exhibition/family-album-by-ivona-tau
Tools
I trained several Stable Diffusion models in Python using the Dreambooth framework, allowing AI to transform these images and videos into new iterations of memory. AI is the perfect medium for this project. Its generative glitches, the fluid, shifting morphs and unreal distortions, serve as an approximation of fractured perception, mirroring the way memory erodes and reshapes itself over time. I find beauty in these imperfections, in the way AI hallucinates people and places that almost exist but never fully do. These digital artifacts echo the way my grandmother’s mind reassembled her past, creating a world that felt real to her but was built from fragmented recollections.
Boris Eldagsen is a Berlin-based artist and a thought leader in AI. Known for rejecting the Sony World Photo Award in 2023, he sparked a global debate on AI and photography. He exhibits internationally, is a sought-after keynote speaker, and leads pioneering workshops on AI-generated images.
I know what dementia is. Mymother has it. I’ve watched memory leak from her like light through oldcurtains—beautiful and broken, familiar and gone. That’s why Ivona Tau’s FamilyAlbum touched me deeply.
These images stammer. Theyshimmer. They get it wrong—like my mother calling me by my brother’s name, ordescribing the house we never lived in. Ivona understands this: that memory,when cracked open by illness, becomes more poem than record.
Ivona doesn’t use AI to showoff. She uses it to mourn. To gather the crumbs of a lineage lost toforgetting. There’s love here—ferocious, desperate, soft. These images quiverwith longing. They’re like prayers coded in pixels.
Some people think AI can’tfeel. But Ivona makes it feel for her. She trained the AI on her granny’sfamily albums—notto generate fantasy, but to retrieve emotion from ruins. Her grandmother’sstories, her slipping grip on language—all of it transfigured into the strange,trembling beauty of half-formed faces and dreamlike light.
This is not nostalgia. It’selegy. And I’m standing inside it, raw and grateful. Because sometimes, whenyou’re losing someone day by day, all you want is to remember how it felt. Ivonagives us that. Not truth, but essence. Not accuracy, but love.
