Centred around the idea of personal and collective memory, “Random Access Memory” is composed of collages cobbled together using the data from these discarded SD cards. The assortment is random; the artist’s ease of access to the photographs intentionally troubling. In these works, Lina probes the supposed security of the Secure Digital card, unearthing data erased by their photographers and subjects, but not beyond the realm of recovery. I think about all the memory cards I’ve let slip through my fingers and into the ether, filled with personal images I’d “erased” but which, in someone else’s hands, someone less benevolent than Lina,  might be resuscitated.

Lina mounted her found photos in acrylic, on wood, and in rotating digital frames, a fond homage to the kitschy forms of memory preservation in the early 2000s. Most of the figures who feature would be recognisable only to those intimately acquainted with their clothing, the particular curl of their hair, and the arch of their back as they plunge into a tiled blue swimming pool. Where faces might appear, their identities are masked by blurry overlays or collages or an artfully placed hand.

Many of the photographs selected by the artist are almost ubiquitous, possessed of that mysterious generic quality that lends itself so readily to false memory. The elasticity of our technological age and how steeped we are in other people’s data has ushered in a new meaning to the already tricky concept of nostalgia. Was this my memory or someone else’s? I find myself wondering.

Is it possible to be a digital person and still maintain privacy, “Random Access Memory” seems to ask? Maybe to possess any degree of digital literacy is to forsake the delicious seclusion of anonymity, to open yourself up to being haunted by cringey relics from the past—whether in the form of a Facebook friendship anniversary with someone who platonically broke your heart, an Instagram memory that dredges up a haircut you thought you’d evicted from the face of the planet, or an SD card filled with nudes you never once imagined anyone else would see but you. This doesn’t mean we have to forgo our inner worlds; Lina’s gentle but provocative exhibition reminds me, only to get comfortable with the idea that, once expressed, they don’t belong to just us anymore.

Isn’t that the same for any form of creative expression, digital or analogue? You can burn the handwritten letter, tear the painting to shreds, delete any record of a snapshot being taken, but it doesn’t change the fact that at one point in time, you wanted to say that, to capture those feelings, to cast this moment in amber. To delete something, I have to begrudgingly admit that it exists. I have to look it in the eye, call it by its name,  remember what it once was to me, and make an active choice to kill my darling. Seen this way, erasure is also an existential affirmation, a gesture of intimacy.

In “Voice”, an acrylic block of a photograph of a couple sunbathing on the balcony of what could be any small hotel in any seaside town, Lina shields her vicarious subjects’ identities with bright rectangular images collaged over their faces. Nevertheless, her composition is a mischievous reminder that they could be any of us. The recurring themes of holidays, birthdays, and plated food recurring in almost every SD card she recovered reinforce this point, implicitly evoking the trending adage of the TikTok age: I have never had a unique experience.

Adorning the space of the Rabbett Gallery as one might populate a minimalistic apartment with personal possessions, “Random Access Memory” troubles the boundary between the familiar and the strange. This exhibition draws upon experiences that lurk at the back of all of our minds, whether from our own recollections, films we watched in childhood, or a story someone told us in passing and that we’ve unintentionally co-opted as our own—just waiting for the right cue, the Proustian invocation.

Lina A.’s work is an unflinching acknowledgement of our collective impulse, whether for voyeuristic or sentimental reasons, to catalogue and store memory, to reconstruct experiences by way of trinkets and souvenirs, to find ways to house and exhibit our personal archives. At once tender, tongue-in-cheek, and unabashedly curious, “Random Access Memory” contends with secondhand forgotten data, opening up an intriguing space to discuss how we document, remember, store, discard, and repurpose moments—our own and those of others.