Remember is one of Pacheco’s largest works to date, numbering twenty figures in four groups. Two men supporting a third at the base of a ladder are the focal point. Nearby a group of seated men, women and children huddle together.

One of their number, a woman, seems to have spotted the men in the first group and turns towards them. A figure among a group of five females also appears to have noticed them. She seems on the point of leaving her companions, who remain imperturbable presences. In the fourth group an altercation has broken out, to judge from gestures of belligerence and attempts to restrain.

Following her exhibition at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2017, Ana Maria Pacheco was invited to return in 2020 with a new work but this was cancelled due to the pandemic. Two years on, the exhibition finally took place in July 2022 and a new multi-figure sculpture, Remember, was exhibited for the first time along with four earlier sculptural groups: Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008, Some Exercise of Power, 1980, Acrobats, 1983 and The Banquet, 1985 - and a series of seven polychrome wood reliefs: Be Aware, 2017-22.

Pacheco’s preparatory work, or ‘circumnavigation’ as she more accurately describes it, provides insights into the evolution of Remember. Monoprints and silverpoint drawings depict groups of people that recall images of the world’s displaced people, some hemmed in behind barbed wire, some self-flagellating and some helpless sufferers. Other drawings relate to the three men and the ladder, the drawings themselves deriving from an image of two male dancers that Pacheco says was one of the triggers for this work, their bodies entwined in a pose of empathy and compassion. Her relief sculptures, particularly Be Aware, allowed Pacheco to explore the orchestration of figures in small spaces, one of which depicts a scene of brawling figures. In all this work we see aspects of human behaviour and levels of human consciousness that are distilled and internalised in the final sculpture.

Memory and the abuse of power are recurrent themes throughout all of Pacheco’s work. The first major sculpture that she produced after coming to London in 1973 was Some Exercise of Power (1980) and the titles of two much later works, Memória Roubada I & II (2001-08) (exhibited at the Galway Festival in 2017) translate as ‘Stolen Memory’. These two themes come together in Remember. Memory is not only fundamental to humans’ sense of themselves as individuals and societies but, as we are becoming increasingly aware, of the species itself: it is fundamental to survival - and we forget at our peril.

Robert Bush, 2022