The contributors to „Experience, Memory, Re-enactment“ employ reconstructions and re-enactments to explore how experience and memory are simultaneously culturally constructed and personally lived. Their works take playful and parodying forms, but often also literally or metaphorically put the individual body at risk. They thus recall in the viewer the impossibility of taking a distance and of separating analytical reflection and emotional response.
A special screening programme accompanies the launch of Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories at the Piet Zwart Institute, featuring films and audio works by notable artists including Samuel Beckett, Lina Issa, and Alvin Lucier. This event explores themes of memory, voice, and the body, particularly in contexts where our usual capacities to sense, remember, and communicate are disrupted. Such disruptions can arise from experiences like living under oppressive regimes, migration, or challenges in expressing oneself in a foreign language, as well as physical conditions like aphasia or stuttering. These moments of struggle with memory, language, and bodily function prompt critical questions about the values we ascribe to memory, voice, and the body, and their roles in shaping our identity and existence as subjects. Increasingly, we perceive memory, voice, and bodily sensations not merely as possessions but as active processes. However, when these abilities falter, our engagement with the world and our sense of agency come into question. This raises profound inquiries about our sense of self and our connections with others, especially when grappling with dislocation from our surroundings, unfamiliar voices, or bodies that feel beyond our control.
„Looking, Encountering, Staging“ investigates the ways cultural practices (exhibitions, news reports, documentary photography, artistic and scientific discourses) stage their subjects and thus construct positions for their audiences. The contributors analyse how these positions come to be naturalized as 'given', or use strategies of staging, performing and re-theatricalization to rethink the role of the artist or curator as mediator and to relocate the viewer.
