cutting-edge exhibitions, related or not to a festival

History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance
HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund: June 9 – September 23, 2007

In general, a so-called re-enactment is a historically correct recreation of socially relevant events, such as important battles or other historical events. In a re-enactment, the audience that normally remain passive or at a certain distance of the documented event become immediate witnesses of a (repeated historical) event, which unfolds in front of their eyes, or they become participants in an action, in which they actively participate.

In contemporary art there has been an increasing number of artistic re-enactments – the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. For example, in his work “The Battle of Orgreave” (2001) the British artist Jeremy Deller had a violent clash between miners and police from the year 1984 re-enacted by ex-miners, ex-police and other re-enactors.

Unlike popular historical re-enactments, like e.g. the re-enactment of historical battles, artistic re-enactments are not performative re-stagings of historic situations and events that occurred a long time ago; rather, events (often traumatic ones) are re-enacted that are viewed as very important for the present. Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.

In Dortmund, the exhibition will take place from June 9 – September 23, 2007 – in parallel to Documenta 12 (Kassel) and skulptur.projekte muenster – in the spectacular, 2.200 qm large PHOENIX Halle Dortmund which HMKV uses as an exhibition space since the end of 2003. PHOENIX Halle, built in 1895, is standing on the area of the former Phoenix-West steelworks in Dortmund-Hörde.

The exhibition will then travel to Berlin and be on display at Kunst-Werke from 18 November 2007 until 13 January 2008.

Concept: Inke Arns
Curated by: Inke Arns und Gabriele Horn
Co-Curator: Katharina Fichtner

Guy Ben-Ner (IL/D)
Walter Benjamin (US)
Irina Botea (RO)
C-Level (US)
Daniela Comani (IT/D)
Jeremy Deller (GB)
Rod Dickinson &
Tom McCarthy (GB)
Rod Dickinson (GB)
Nikolai Evreinov (RUS)
Omer Fast (IL/D)
Iain Forsyth &
Jane Pollard (GB)
Heike Gallmeier (D)
Felix Gmelin (SE)
Pierre Huyghe (F)
Evil Knievel (US)
Korpys/Löffler (D)
Robert Longo (US)
Frédéric Moser /
Philippe Schwinger (CH)
Collier Schorr (US)
Kerry Tribe (US)
T.R. Uthco &
Ant Farm (US)
Artur Zmijewski (PL)