History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art
KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
The past is porous, entirely dependent for meaning on the experience of the present; our understanding of history is constantly reshaped and never repeated. KW Institute’s ‘History Will Repeat Itself’ paradoxically testifies to the fact that events never repeat exactly. As one of the characters in Heike Gallmeier and Tabea Sternberg’s ambiguous video Private Battles. Only the past will tell (2007) exclaims: ‘It’s history now .’ The work plays out the problematic and often perverse nature of re-enacting historical events, a concern that echoes throughout the exhibition.
‘History Will Repeat Itself’ successfully affirms that, within contemporary artistic practices concerning the construction and re-enactment of cultural memory, interest lies in observing the mechanisms of reinterpretation. Irina Botea’s video Auditions for a Revolution (2006) highlights the omnipotent presence of the media by deconstructing the theatricality of the events portrayed – a concern also present in Tom McCarthy’s installation, unfortunately awkwardly placed within the gallery. Jeremy Deller’s Turner-winning video re-enactment, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), emphasizes the weight and urgency of history and subtly bears witness to the liminality of its meaning – shame about the overbearing, ugly and incredibly irritating subtitles included here.
Interviewees in Omer Fast’s video installation Spielberg’s List (2003) seem to confuse past and present, fiction and reality. Daniela Comani’s response is to insert herself into history as first-hand narrator of the 20th century with the wall-based and audio installation Diary or Ich war’s. Tagebuch 1900–1999, 2002 (2002). Rod Dickinson’s unsettling video, The Milgram Reenactment (2002), questions our response to the original Milgram experiment (in which individuals subjected others, who they thought were behind blackened glass, to what would have been deadly electrical charges). Felix Gmelin’s mesmerizing video, Farbtest, Die rote Fahne II (2002), offers a less troublesome but equally interesting re-enactment of the eponymous cinematographic exercise.
The unnecessarily historicizing inclusion of Nikolaj Evreinov’s The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) aside, ‘History Will Repeat Itself ‘ ably deconstructs the portrayal of history to reveal the conditions of its construction today. The physicality of re-enactment engages in an active reappropriation of the past (more so than, say, documentation or archive work), replaying known events while positing a new version.
Alice Planel
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