Experimental Repetitions: The Art of Re-enactment

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst hosts a series of presentations, screenings, and discussions with artists and writers Rod Dickinson, Steve Rushton, and Michael Uwemedimo titled Experimental Repetitions: The Art of Re-enactment.

Over the course of the evening, Dickinson, Rushton, and Uwemedimo explore the turn to re-enactment in contemporary art practice over the last decade or so through a mixture of presentations, screenings of works, and active discussion. The “experimental impulse” artists have exhibited in restaging and recording social experiments (as seen, for example, in the work of Artur Żmijewski), protests, traumatic events, and rituals of communality—as well as other artworks themselves—is considered via questions of autonomy, repetition, the generation of knowledge, as well as the relationship of these practices to memory, forgetting, and the establishment of identity. What experimental formal, methodological, and philosophical approaches can forms of re-enactment take? Do such practices allow for moments of “counter-staging” in which a critique of the spectacular use of images and events is possible?

Rod Dickinson is an artist and writer, and is currently a guest of BAK’s Research-in-Residence (RIR) program. His work Greenwich Degree Zero (with Tom McCarthy) will be on view in the upcoming exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm, part of BAK’s three-part project The Return of Religion and Other Myths, 30.11.2008–01.03.2009. Steve Rushton is a writer, editor, and curator who currently teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Michael Uwemedimo is an artist, curator, and writer who was a guest of BAK’s RIR program earlier this year.

Over the course of the evening, Rod Dickinson (RIR guest), Steve Rushton, and Michael Uwemedimo (RIR guest) explore the turn to re-enactment in contemporary art practice over the last decade or so through a mixture of presentations, screenings of works, and active discussion. During this evening a try-out of the performance Who, What, Where, When, Why and How (2009), a work in progress by Rod Dickinson and Steve Rushton was performed by Bert Wagenar van Kreveld and Daniel Popa. The final version of the performance was on view at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam on 11 July 2009.