At a time when history is accelerating as a result of profound socio-cultural change, political shifts or technological evolution, reconstructing our individual past becomes the basis for a fragile identity. This raises the question of the subconscious in history. How do psychological elements shape our historical narratives, and both collective and individual memory? Starting with this question, the Past Desire exhibition is showing ten international artists whose approaches clearly differ from those following documentary and historiographical principles in that they focus on the personal significance of history. The desire for identity, which is always a desire for memory and history as well, represents an important pivotal point here because it establishes an important connection between the subconscious and the conscious, and also between the individual and the collective. The ambiguity of the exhibition title Past Desire relates on the one hand to the longing, characteristic of contemporary society, for collective historical narratives and also personal, subjective memory. On the other hand the title is directed at the entanglement of the individual in history, which is captured in buildings, photographs, archives, memorials and monuments, but also in commemorative or memorial rituals. In this context the works shown in the exhibition focus on three central topics: on the landscapes of architecture and memory that represent and mediate history, and are also symbolic manifestations of the psyche of past generations; on the memory media of photography and film as well as on traumatic moments of the past that constantly penetrate the awareness of the present in different forms. The specific perspectives of the artists that are implemented in the exhibition through the media of photography, film and drawing, and also through sculpture and three-dimensional scenography make it possible for us to take a culturally differentiated look at the psychology of history and