Issue%2026

Our relationship with the past is continuously
being altered by actions taken in the present.
There are always certain moments that resist
finalisation. This pictorial looks at artists who
employ re-performance and re-enactment as
tactics in their practice. In doing so they explore
the possibility of a history that remains in flux.
Here we see artists actively re-engaging with
the past. Their performances are grounded
in something other than mere nostalgia or
aesthetic appropriation. Through re-staging,
the original act is modified and complicated by
a process of sedimentation and accumulation,
allowing us to read new meanings that apply to
our present temporal and geographic context.
The process is reminiscent of the act of
remembering — whereby every time we recall
a memory we are seeing it through the lens of
our amassed experience. By re-performing
past events a new conception of the artwork is
formed, not based on originality, but rather on
its resonance or capacity to (re)iterate in any
given context.
Anahita Razmi's 2011 work Roof Piece
Tehran, is a re-performance of Trisha Brown's
iconic architectural performance Roof Piece,
originally staged in New York, 1971. Razmi's
complex work looks at how rooftops in Iran
became political spaces during the 2009
presidential elections. Her piece references
the call and response anonymous shouting
demonstrations that echoed out from the
rooftops, illegal satellite dishes transmitting
unfiltered foreign media, and the fact that
public performances and dance are severely
restricted in Iran.
In the 1965 performance work by Joseph
Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,
the artist walked around a gallery whispering
descriptions of the pictures on the walls to a
dead hare held in his arms. This seminal work
was re-created by Marina Abramović in 2005
at the Guggenheim in New York as part of
her re-performance series Seven Easy Pieces.
Abramović was not present at the original
staging of the event so her re-performance was
constructed from iconic photo-documentation
and accounts, and performed for a duration
of 7 hours.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave
(2001) was a spectacular re-enactment of
the historic National Union of Mineworkers
strike (1984), where violent confrontations
between police and rioters took place at a
coking plant in South Yorkshire. More
than 800 people participated in Deller's
performance piece, including miners and
policemen from the original strike and
others drawn from battle re-enactment
societies across England.
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Anahita Razmi
Roof Piece Tehran 2011
Video installation,
12 videoloops,
18 min 11 sec each
The Emdash Award
2011Commissioned
and Produced by
Frieze Foundation
for Frieze Projects 2011,
in cooperation with
Hasti Goudarzi
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