‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art in the Realm of the Museum

‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art in the Realm of the Museum

The Potential of Reenactment as Practice of Memorialization

Hélia Marçal

Daniela Salazar

https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_24

https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-21/maral-salazar_political-timing-specific-performance-art.html

https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-21/maral-salazar_political-timing-specific-performance-art.html

Can reenactments be a way to create counter-narratives in and for the museum? Through the analysis of political performance (or what the artist Tania Bruguera calls ‘political-timing-specific’ artworks), this essay discusses the potential of reenactment as both a practice of materializing memories and narratives of oppression and of rethinking museum policies in terms of preservation and display. Its main argument is that, while the archive can be regarded as a form of materializing the memory of these works, reenactment is more than a way of recovering the past; it is also a device for reconstructing memories of activism and oppression. This essay further suggests that reenactments of political-timing-specific works demand a change in accessioning, conservation, and presentation practices, which might be inclined to erase decentralized art-historical and material narratives.

Berlin

ICI Berlin Press

January 4, 2022

reenactment

museum

activism

political-timing-specific art

memory

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Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art

239

254

Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 239–54