DOMENICO QUARANTA » re-enactment

You’re Not My Father

Domenico Quaranta — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:41:06 +0000

Paul Slocum, You’re Not My Father, 2007. Re-enactments solicited through the Internet of a 10 second scene from Full House.

Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different

Domenico Quaranta — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:48:26 +0000

Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman), Machine Project, Los Angeles, Saturday February 9th, 2008.

Domenico Quaranta, “Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal in 2 parts,August 22 and August 23, 2007

“The difference between what is evoked and what is real can even be sensible: I always happen to take no account of it.”

I started thinking to post on reenactment some time ago. That’s why when I read on -empyre- Patrick Lichty’s “missive” on The Issue of Remediation, I was happy and disappointed at the same time: disappointed because he came first, and happy because he showed the way, giving me some points of departure to enter this complicated issue. Let me sum up Lichty’s points:

- “ironic tension between the physical and the virtual” vs “affective connection [of the user] to online identity”;
- history and memory vs ephemerality and ahistoricity in virtual worlds;
- reenactment of performance-based works as “a way to preserve their degree of affect in space and time” vs reenactment as a way to challange/criticize Performance art.

As for the first point, I completely agree with Lichty. The problem is: which is the target of this irony? Lichty notes that, in the passage from the real to the virtual, an act, for example, of violence, doesn’t become “wholly symbolic”, because “residents in Second Life clearly have investiture in the avatar as extensions of themselves.” That’s right, but this observation works only when the victim of violence is your own avatar. In other words, in Second Life this affect takes the shape of self respect, but doesn’t produce solidarity for other virtual identities. So, if I’m frightened, worried and even angry when Gazira Babeli confines me in a Campbell’s soup can, or when she breaks up my legs with Code Deforma; I don’t feel anything similar to what might have felt the audience of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) when Eva Mattes fires Franco Mattes, or when Wirxli Flimflam shoots Great Escape.

In the same time, I believe that these two reenactments of the same performance are coming from a very different order of ideas. In his Paradise Ahead Series (2006 – 2007), Scott Kildall aka Great Escape “captures the anticipation and familiarity of [the] simulated environment by restaging iconic art installations, films and photographs. Using only primitive graphics of Second Life, the documentation of these performances – large-scale prints serves as a historical record of the initial launch point into simulated worlds.” His target is the graphic environment of Second Life; or, better, Second Life as an artistic medium. And his message is, I think, that in Second Life reality becomes powerless, ineffective, fake. Even the most emotional, dramatic event, when re-staged in Second Life, becomes a parody of itself. Kildall’s prints are more similar to comics than to the source images he used for his remediation. In other words, the medium is stronger than the reality it tries to emulate.

Coming to Eva and Franco Mattes, in their interviews they are very critical about Performance Art: “Eva and me, we hate performance art, we never quite got the point. So, we wanted to understand what made it so un-interesting to us, and reenacting these performances was the best way to figure it out.” With their Syntethic Performances, they are questioning the works they recreate, reproposing them in the most literal way in a context where they appear senseless and paradoxical. Their realistic avatar are perfect to this purpose. And in fact, their reenactment of Shoot is more similar to the source, and much more dramatic than Kildall’s one: they are not saying that in a virtual world violence is meaningless and reality loses its own drama; they are saying that, in a world anaesthetized by media, the original Shoot is almost as powerless as their own virtual version. In a world where, in front of a car crash, people take pictures with their beautiful smart phones instead of trying to help the victims, Shoot can’t be anything more than an interesting spectacle. Video killed the performance art stars. RIP.

In his Missive 3, Lichty asks: “could the remediation of historical works, from 7000 Oaks to sculptures of the David be prime examples of the appropriations of history in cultural milieus that do not possess them?” I don’t think that the answer to this question would be “yes”. Believing that Second Life is “a dumpster of the imaginary”, the fruit of the collective dream of the amount of its residents, I can’t believe that it suffers of a lack of memory. Quite the opposite, I think that Second Life in itself IS memory. Second Life IS remediation. Second Life IS re-enactment, not of our first life – as most people think – not of Snow Crash or The Matrix – as many other people think – but of a sort of mediated unconscious, that is nothing more that our visual culture, and that helps building up the frame through which we look at reality.

Virtual worlds are the places where pop culture, the cyberpunk imagery, cinema, television, postmodern architecture, pornography, contemporary art, literature, design and so on all collapse and mix together to create a new world. Making art, you can choose and recycle one of the bricks of the wall or add your own brick. So, when Eva and Franco Mattes remediate Warhol’s portraits, or when Patrick Lichty himself remediates Cicciolina, they point out to a stereotype that is commonplace in Second Life – where most avatars want to be young, sexy, beautiful, photogenic – and they improve it by recalling its historical roots, namely the ideal of beauty imposed by media and pop culture, investigated by Warhol in his Screen Tests and in his tons of portraits, and embodied by Cicciolina in the Eighties. They are improving a memory, rather then creating it ex-novo. This is virtuous recycling. When Dancoyote Antonelli builds up a new installation, he is remediating the aesthetics and the ideals of Cyberart of the Early Nineties, or – better – he is emulating it on a new machine; this is all the new I can find in hyperformalism (and in fact, what is new and fascinating in the hands of Dancoyote Antonelli, appears pretty old-fashioned and overtaken in the hands of DC Spensley); but it’s not that bad, because we forgot almost all about Cyberart, and a refresh can be useful…

About the relationship between re-enactments and the original piece, I think the question is really complex, and we can’t come out with just one answer. In the press release of the show History will repeat itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance (HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, June 9 – September 23, 2007), curator Inke Arns writes: “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.” The show is more about repetition of historical events than of Performance Art of the past, but this observation works also in SL: artists use reenactment as a way (1) to question the present and (2) the way media mediated memory. Besides that, they question (3) the medium they work in (Scott Kildall) and (4) the original work of art (Eva and Franco Mattes), raising questions such as: why is it significant / meaningless to me? why does it work / doesn’t work in SL? What does REALLY change when I change the contest and the medium?

This very last question introduces another interesting issue, and another interesting form of re-enactment: what will happen if we start re-mediating Second Life in the real world? This is a really compelling question. We usually think about the relationship between virtual worlds and real life as univocal, even if many events – from the Columbine massacre to cosplaying – showed us that it is definitely bi-univocal. Some artists already started to work on that, with interesting results: from Eddo Stern’s SCA Arab Intervention (2004) to Brody Condon’s Death Animations (2007), in which an actor performs the death animations of a videogame. Concerning SL, I know just a few examples, such as Goldin+Senneby’s Objects of virtual desire (2006) and Aram Bartholl‘s Tree (2007), an unfinished “virtual” tree brought to the public space. But what will happen if, let’s say, Second Front will start performing in real life, or Gazira Babeli will rebuild her provocative installations in the real space? Then we’ll see that virtual worlds are not “just like the real world”, as many people think, but something completely different.

Displaced Familiarity. Interview with Scott Kildall

Domenico Quaranta — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:38:46 +0000

Scott Kildall, Void (2006). Recreation of "Leap Into the Void »" by Yves Klein

Domenico Quaranta, “Displaced Familiarity. Interview with Scott Kildall”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal, August 31, 2007.

Scott Kildall is a visual artist currently living in San Francisco, where he is working as a fellowship artist with the Kala Art Institute. In 2006 he received an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting in 2001, he put together a huge body of work in a variety of media including video installation, sound architecture, electromechanical sculpture and single-channel video projection.

Being interested in issues such as “dislocation, transition and emotional upheaval” and in the “exploration of anticipatory moments”, it’s no surprise that he was attracted by Second Life, where he become Great Escape, the purple-faced member of the Second Front performance group, that he co-founded in 2006. There he anticipated the re-enactment trend with his print series Paradise Ahead, and there he is developing (together with artist Victoria Scott) his last project, No Matter, one of the winners of the Mixed Realities Commissions organized by Turbulence.org and Ars Virtua (see the end of this interview for more details on the project). By the way, No Matter is not the first fruit of this collaboration: in 2006 they made, for a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, 2×2, an interactive (that doesn’t mean digital) installation about the psychology of online social networks: basically, a message board with a grid of holes where people can put their messages (written on rolled-up post-its), read and take away messages left by other people in an evolving, “anonymous and public information system”.

I interviewed Scott about Paradise Ahead, a series of 12 large scale digital prints which documents re-enactments of historical performances – but also sculptures, videos and photographs – he made in Second Life, often with the kind help and participation of another Second Life star, Second Fronter Wirxli Flimflam.

DQ. When and why did you start your Paradise Ahead series?
SK. I began working on the series in September 2006; I produced the first performance-print Void [from Yves Klein] in November 2006. I followed this with Shoot [from Chris Burden] in December. I finished the last one in the series of twelve in May 2007.
When I began exploring in Second Life, the unlimited real estate captivated me. I saw an extension of the California dream. Empty structures populated the landscape. Various architectures and landscapes fused in dreamlike configurations. The geography indexed a cultural desire for a world that both conforms to and escapes the ailments of modern life.
My research led to making artworks of remediation of iconic performances, sculptures and video. These produce a feeling of displaced familiarity. At the same time they link Second Life back to what has been done in the physical world while asserting the primacy of the document in the artwork itself. Here, I place the geography in the background of the prints while still examining questions of the body in a simulated world.

DQ. What’s the meaning of the title?
SK. The title refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which details Satan’s fall from the heavens and subsequent interference with humankind. In the last 400 years due to advancements in science and philosophy, spiritual space has slowly collapsed, favoring a singular physical reality. Milton’s poem was the last of an era – when the concept of a soul space equaled that of reality.
Second Life opens an alternate space – one that resembles our physical reality but doesn’t exist in any sort of tangible spatial-time grid. The potential is huge. I see many in Second Life looking for transcendental experience. What interests me with this series is capturing those common feelings of hope and fear associated with this re-spatialized world.

DQ. Why did you choose to translate this series of performances into a series of prints, rather than videos?
SK. The original artworks exist in our cultural memory as single frames. Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void is a photograph; Maurizio Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour is a sculpture. While the video documentation of Chris Burden’s Shoot is available in galleries and even on YouTube, it is this one image before he is shot that propagates throughout art history books.
These documents serve an archival purpose and feel frozen in time. They embody a pastness to them related to the role of the photograph. I wanted to mirror the role of the archived document and capture the feel of this simulated world in 2006-2007. In 20 years, I’ll look back at these and think that was what Second Life looked like as a snapshot.
I considered using video, but I felt that this would dilute the tension inherent in the content of each of these performances. An avatar viewed in mid-air after leaping from a building captures the state of being in-between; in a video the avatar would land unharmed in an act of slapstick comedy. By using a single image, I let the viewer resolve the consequences of the action.

DQ. Among the works you recreated in Second Life (not only performances, but also sculptures and photographs), there are not only historic pieces, but also some very recent works. Why? How did you choose them?
SK. My starting point was with conceptual art performances of the 60s and 70s that were captured on video. This is a turning point in performance art where the mediated environment began superceding live performance. A small number of people have seen one of the Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece performance; many times more have watched the video in galleries and museums. The video has both eclipsed and substituted for the performance.

Many recent works have progressed this experience of the mediated environment. Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth is an eight-channel installation dependent on the viewer walking through the space. But, the lone image of the shopping cart in the parking lot is what lingers. Even in a recent artist talk I saw by him, he showed a few minutes of single-channel video of the shopping cart scene played from his computer. He didn’t even mention that it was a multi-channel installation!

The Ninth Hour by Maurizio Cattelan depicts a sculpture of the pope after being struck by a meteorite. But the photographs make the figure look so real that it seems like a person doing a live performance. From viewer’s vantage point, the media gets obscured. Although we read that this is a sculpture, it feels just like a still from a performance piece.

DQ. I read Paradise Ahead as an effort to question Second Life as a medium of representation of reality. It’s like if you are saying: if other media (such as video, photo, installation etc.) are able to reproduce reality, Second Life totally betrays it. You can’t preserve it’s own emotional atmosphere: tragedy becomes parody, the drama is completely lost… Am I right?
SK. The experience in Second Life can’t be captured through media. Any sort of representation appears as an unreality but when operating your avatar, it feels real in many ways. I see a chasm in between viewer and producer that is greater than in video or photography. Because the prints directly refer to other works, we can look at comparisons to other media.
Most people I talk to about Second Life have never ventured into the environment. Many think the prints are from a video game, but then something doesn’t make sense. The scenes are obviously staged and feel familiar. The 3D graphics are unsophisticated compared to current game engines.
Because the prints are indirect in representation but figurative in content, audiences have vastly different reactions. Some see them as emotionally bereft, others as satire and some as hyper-dramatic. I am compelled by the various reads on the works as they point to our collective notions of emotional content in surreal space.

DQ. If simulated worlds can’t be used to reproduce reality, what you – as an artist – can do with them?
SK. Simulated worlds compel me precisely because they fail to reproduce reality. Besides the disembodied actions and 3D graphics, there are many other layers of socialization and economies that diverge from real life. I’m most interested in the gaps between the desired representation and the actual result. From here, I examine at how others relate to the dissonances in the simulated – whether it is as a viewer, performer or active participant.
I am currently working on a Turbulence commission called No Matter in collaboration with Victoria Scott. We are commissioning builders to make “imaginary objects” – material things that have never existed in pure physical form such as the Holy Grail, Excalibur, Schrödinger’s cat and The Book of Love. Also studying the virtual economy, we will pay them Second Life wages, which are below minimum wage. We will extract these models and print them as foldable paper models. At the exhibition, viewers will assemble these on factory-style tables into 3D paper forms using scissors and glue. The get paid the same Second Life wages. Afterwards we will sell the models of eBay as finished artworks.
With projects like this as well as my continued work in the performance art group, Second Front, I’ve seen an incredible amount of artistic space in simulated worlds. I think artists are just starting to uncover other areas for exploration. The combination of simulated space and massive social interactions is unique. Between a whole other concept of space and a semi-anonymous relational environment, there are many facets beyond the reproduction of reality to artistically explore.

RE:AKT!

Domenico Quaranta — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:53:55 +0000

Antonio Caronia, Janez Jansa, Domenico Quaranta (eds), RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, FPEditions, March 2009. Euro 25,00, ISBN: 978-88-903308-6-5, English. With contributions by: Jennifer Allen, Antonio Caronia, Rod Dickinson, Domenico Quaranta, Jan Verwoert.

Just what is it that leads many contemporary artists to restage historic events, performances of the past, even imaginary events? Are they possessed by the post-modern demon? Does this practice spring from a cynical awareness of the decline of values? Is it yet another variation on “the end of history”? Or is it simply the end of the modern myth of the “originality” of the work of art, and an attempt to find a different, deeper path to critique the medial ideology of contemporary society?
Through the texts of critics, theorists and artists as Jennifer Allen, Antonio Caronia, Rod Dickinson, Domenico Quaranta and Jan Verwoert, and through the works by Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Quentin Drouet, Janez Jansa, Janez Jansa, Janez Jansa, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG) and SilentCell Network, RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting wants to offer some answers to these questions linked to the artistic practice of re-enactment and its possible redefinition.

To buy it or watch a sneak preview: FPEditions.com

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting - Press Release Škuc

Domenico Quaranta — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:17:00 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RE:akt!
Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
www.reakt.org

Galerija Škuc
Stari trg 21, Ljubljana, Slovenia
25 March – 17 April 2009

Presentation of the book: 25 March 2009 at 19:00
Exhibition opening: 25 March 2009 at 20:00

Featured artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network (Mare Bulc, Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Igor Štromajer)

Galerija Škuc is proud to announce “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, the exhibition of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

During recent years the term re-enactment and the practices it refers to have enjoyed increasing success in the artistic context. On one hand, the success of re-enactment appears to be connected to a parallel, vigorous return to performance art, both as a genre practiced by the new generations, and as an artistic practice with its own historicization. On the other hand the term re-enactment accompanies two phenomena that at least at first glance have very little in common: re-staging artistic performances of the past, and revisiting, in performance form, “real” events – be they linked to history or current affairs, past or present.
“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” tries both to research on the complexity of this concept and to get rid of it, approaching re-enactment not merely as “live action role-playing” or “living history” but rather as a strategy for cultural critique, analysis and artistic expression. “RE:akt!” – meaning not only “to act again” but also “to respond to / to react upon” and “Regarding: act!”– confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and re-reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project “RE:akt!” examines media’s roles in manipulating perceptions and creating postmodern historical myths and contemporary mythology.

Thus, “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, curated by the Italian art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta, will collect ten different approaches to the concept of enaction: from Ich Lubbe Berlin! (2005, SilentCell Network), a take on the 1933 burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, which explores the contemporary meaning of symbols such as the Reichstag itself, and of concepts such as “communism” and “terrorism”; to Das KAPITAL (2006, Janez Janša), a performance which re-stages the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces with the languages of popular street artists; from C’était un rendez-vous (déja vu) (Janez Janša in collaboration with Quentin Drouet), a project that plays with the paradigmatic history of a well known artwork, the film C’était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch, from “cinema verité” to “media fiction”; to VD as VB (2007), a series of actions in which Vaginal Davis, the “grande dame” of the queer underground in Los Angeles, dialogues with Vanessa Beecroft’s performances. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav (2007), the three artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša re-stage a well known performance of the OHO group from the late Sixties, recently appropriated by the IRWIN group for their Like to Like Series (2004), performing it on the Mount Triglav itself, and then translating it into a monumental golden sculpture; while in Slovene National Theatre (2007), Janez Janša translates an infamous fact of recent racism against Gypsies – known in Slovenia as “the Ambrus case” – into a piece of theatre, re-invoicing it as it was featured by the mass media. In their Synthetic Performances (2007), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG reenact on the virtual platform of Second Life a series of historical performances that are all but virtual, raising issues such as body, violence, sex and pain, thus exploring the meaning of these very issues in a virtual world. In SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), Janez Janša (in collaboration with Dejan Dragosavac Ruta) again adds details and proofs of evidence to an “urban legend” recently circulated on the Net and mainstream media, concerning the presumed creation of a cyber-sex doll by the Nazis. Thus, performance and reenactment are far from being the only strategies adopted in “RE:akt!”, which also involves strategies such as documentation, remix, re-invoicement, reconstruction and remediation (such as in the project The Day São Paulo Stopped 2009 by Brazilian artist Lucas Bambozzi), and media such as photographic print, video, media installation and even architecture (such as in the project Il porto dell’amore, by Janez Janša (in collaboration with Bor Pungerčič), an homage to Fiume as an example of pirate utopia).

On Wednesday, March 25, Škuc will host the presentation of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting featuring the co-editors Janez Janša, artist and director of Aksioma and the italian theoretician Antonio Caronia. The book was published on March 2009 by FPeditions and includes contributions by Rod Dickinson, Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Antonio Caronia and Domenico Quaranta. More: www.reakt.org/book

On Saturday, March 28, SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), by Janez Janša will be presented in a solo show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in Brescia, Italy. More: www.fabioparisartgallery.com.

On May 22, the exhibition will travel to MMSU – Museum of Moder
n and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

FREE IMAGES FOR PRESS and MORE INFO:
www.reakt.org/press

Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
www.aksioma.org

Galerija Škuc
http://www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si/

Supported by:
the European Cultural Foundation www.eurocult.org
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia www.mk.gov.si
the Municipality of Ljubljana www.ljubljana.si
the Italian Cultural Institut in Ljubljana www.iiclubiana.esteri.it/IIC_Lubiana
The programme of Galerija Škuc is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia and the City Council Ljubljana-Cultural department.

Contact:
Marcela Okretič
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Neubergerjeva 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija
gsm : +386 – (0)41 250 830
e-mail: aksioma4@siol.net
www.aksioma.org

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting (2009)

Domenico Quaranta — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:07:00 +0000

Photo: George Vasilache. Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

RE:akt! | reconstruction, re-enactment, re-reporting

MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest
January 22 gennaio – March 13, 2009
Exhibition curator: Domenico Quaranta
Platform conceived by: Janez Janša

Featured Artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Quentin Drouet, IRWIN, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network.

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2006-2009
Producer: Marcela Okretic
Project supported by: the European Cultural Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana

Official website

Video documentation (by Janez Janša, on Vimeo):

RE:akt! from aksioma on Vimeo.

Re:akt! @ MNAC from veioza arte on Vimeo.

Images from the exhibition (Picasa):

Re:akt! Bucharest

————————————————

RE:akt! | reconstruction, re-enactment, re-reporting

Photo: Miha Fras. Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

ŠKUC Gallery
Stari trg 21, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
March 25 – April 17, 2009
Opening: March 25, 2009, at 20:00
Exhibition curator: Domenico Quaranta
Platform conceived by: Janez Janša

Featured Artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Quentin Drouet, IRWIN, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network

More info

Press corner

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RE:akt! | reconstruction, re-enactment, re-reporting

Photo: Janez Janša. Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka

Dolac 1/II, Rijeka, Croatia

28 May – 21 June 2009

Panel discussion: 28 May 2009 at 17:00

Featuring Domenico Quaranta, Antonio Caronia, Tomislav Medak, Sunčica Ostojć and Martina Vovk

Exhibition opening: 28 May 2009 at 20:00

Exhibition curator: Domenico Quaranta
Platform conceived by: Janez Janša

Featured artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Quentin Drouet, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Irwin, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), OHO group, SilentCell Network (Mare Bulc, Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Igor Štromajer).

More info

Press corner

VIDEO ESSAYS:

RE:akt! – Domenico Quaranta from aksioma on Vimeo.

RE:akt! – Antonio Caronia from aksioma on Vimeo.

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting – Press Release MNAC

Domenico Quaranta — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:44:00 +0000

Reakt! Poster of the exhibition

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana and
MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest
present:

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
www.reakt.org

MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest
Izvor St. 2-4, wing E4, Bucharest, Romania / Entrance from Calea 13 Septembrie
22 January – 13 March 2009

Panel discussion: 22 January 2009 at 18:00 Exhibition opening: 22 January 2009 at 19:00

MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest is proud to announce “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, the world preview of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” conceived by Janez Janša and produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” tries both to research on the complexity of this concept and to get rid of it, approaching re-enactment not merely as “live action role-playing” or “living history” but rather as a strategy for cultural critique, analysis and artistic expression. “RE:akt!” – meaning not only “to act again” but also “to respond to / to react upon” and “Regarding: act!”– confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and re-reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project “RE:akt!” examines media’s roles in manipulating perceptions and creating postmodern historical myths and contemporary mythology.

Thus, “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, curated by the Italian art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta, will collect ten different approaches to the concept ofenaction: from Ich Lubbe Berlin! (2005, SilentCell Network), a take on the 1933 burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, which explores the contemporary meaning of symbols such as the Reichstag itself, and of concepts such as “communism” and “terrorism”; to Das KAPITAL (2006, Janez Janša), a performance which re-stages the 1969 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces with the languages of popular street artists; from C’était un rendez-vous (déja vu) (Janez Janša and Quentin Drouet), a project that plays with the paradigmatic history of a well known artwork, the film C’était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch, from “cinema verité” to “media fiction”; to VD as VB (2007), a series of actions in which Vaginal Davis, the “grande dame” of the queer underground in Los Angeles, dialogues with Vanessa Beecroft’s performances. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav (2007 – 2008), the three artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša re-stage a well known performance of the OHO group from the late Sixties, recently appropriated by the IRWIN group for their Like to Like Series (2004), performing it on the Mount Triglav itself, and then translating it into a monumental golden sculpture; while in Slovene National Theatre (2007), Janez Janša translates an infamous fact of recent racism against Gypsies – known in Slovenia as “the Ambrus case” – into a piece of theatre, re-invoicing it as it was featured by the mass media. In their Synthetic Performances (2007), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG reenact on the virtual platform of Second Life a series of historical performances that are all but virtual, raising issues such as body, violence, sex and pain, thus exploring the meaning of these very issues in a virtual world. In SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), Janez Janša again adds details and proofs of evidence to an “urban legend” recently circulated on the Net and mainstream media, concerning the presumed creation of a cyber-sex doll by the Nazis. Thus, performance and reenactment are far from being the only strategies adopted in “RE:akt!”, which also involves strategies such as documentation, remix, re-invoicement, reconstruction and remediation (such as in the project The Day São Paulo Stopped 2009 by Brazilian artist Lucas Bambozzi), and media such as photographic print, video, media installation and even architecture (such as in the project Il porto dell’amore, by Janez Janša, an homage to Fiume as an example of pirate utopia).

On Thursday, January 22, MNAC will host a panel discussion featuring Domenico Quaranta, curator of the exhibition; Janez Janša, artist and director of Aksioma; and the italian theoretician Antonio Caronia, co-editor of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, to be published on March 2009 (with contributions by Rod Dickinson, Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Antonio Caronia and Domenico Quaranta). On March 25, the exhibition will travel to ŠKUC gallery, Ljubljana (Slovenia) and then further to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

FREE IMAGES FOR PRESS and MORE INFO:
http://www.reakt.org/

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
www.aksioma.org

Supported by
the European Cultural Foundation www.eurocult.org
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
the Municipality of Ljubljana

Thanks to:
Institut Français de Bucarest, Irwin, Claude Lelouch – LES FILMS 13, Moderna galerija Ljubljana, MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts Ljubljana, RPS d.o.o.

Contacts:

Oana Tanase
MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest
Izvor St. 2-4, w
ing E4, Bucharest, Romania
phone: +40 – (0)21 318 91 37
e-mail: oana@spic.ro
www.mnac.ro

Marcela Okretič
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Neubergerjeva 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija
gsm : +386 – (0)41 250 830
e-mail: aksioma4@siol.net
www.aksioma.org