Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment’s potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.
Table of Contents
I. Uncovering the Historical Past, Performing the Political Present
- The Reenacted Double: Repetition as a Creative Paradox
- ‘The Reconstruction of the Past is the Task of Historians and not Agents’: Operative Reenactment in State Security Archives
- The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders: Reconstruction as ‘Democratic Gesture’
- Insistence: The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political
- ‘Interrupting the Present’: Political and Artistic Forms of Reenactments in South Africa
- Resounding Difficult Histories
- Archival Diffractions: A Response to Le Nemesiache’s Call
- Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction: Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive
II. Aesthetic Forms of Rehabilitation
- Unintentional Reenactments: Yella by Christian Petzold
- Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment: Revisiting Cavell’s Emerson
- Speculative Writing: Unfilmed Scripts and Premediation Events
- Reenactment in Theatre: Some Reflections on the Philosophical Status of Restaging
- Re-search, Re-enactment, Re-design, Re-programmed Art
- In the Beginning There Is an End: Approaching Gina Pane, Approaching Discours mou et mat
- Performance Art in the 1990s and the Generation Gap
III. Resistance and Reconciliation in the Museum
- Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process
- Reconciling Authenticity and Reenactment: An Art Conservation Perspective
- UNFOLD: The Strategic Importance of Reinterpretation for Media Art Mediation and Conservation
- Unfold Nan Hoover: On the Importance of Actively Encouraging a Variable Understanding of Artworks for the Sake of their Preservation and Mediation
- Living Simulacrum: The Neoplastic Room in Łódź: 1948 / 1960 / 1966 / 1983 / 2006 / 2008 / 2010 / 2011 / 2013 / 2017 / ∞
- ‘Repetition: Summer Display 1983’ at Van Abbemuseum: Or, What Institutional Curatorial Archives Can Tell Us about the Museum
- ‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art in the Realm of the Museum: The Potential of Reenactment as Practice of Memorialization
- ‘We Are Gathering Experience’: Restaging the History of Art Education
