ART-PRESENTATION: Past is Not Post

Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, Photo:Bertrand Huet Realized during the Les, Moulins Residency Program. With thanks to the associate curator Clare Carolin, With the support of the University of the Arts London and La Maréchalerie centre d'art Versailles, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art ArchiveThe group exhibition “Past is Not Post” examines a growing number of artists working in relationship to archival research or investigations of historical memory. While the sites, methods, and circumstances of these practices remain diverse, there is a common artistic impulse to work through history as a backdoor when options in the present seem closed.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art Archive

Given the ambiguous role of artists in contemporary societies, particularly the difficulty of connecting to existing political and social struggles, the intersectional and incomplete stories of the past offer alternate approaches. Can this engagement of the past create spaces to rearticulate our collective possibilities and demands, spaces emblematic of both resistance and retreat? While these techniques are by no means new, the 21st Century emergence of the film/video essay or archival image appropriation as mainstream rather than marginal modes of production, prevalent within art and increasingly popular on online video platform, is very new. Despite the present cultural awareness of these media’s almost complete manipulability, there remains a paradoxical “special relationship” between the camera and history, perhaps no longer resting on common notions of empirical truth but instead the search for political affect, kernels of potentiality viewed in light of what is missing today. Why do artists continue to find revisiting the past a useful way of working? How do we ask such questions while at the same time recognizing the many important inventions and struggles by artists, filmmakers, and historians to render visible histories of oppression and marginalization? more pressing questions. “Past is Not Post” corresponds with an ongoing inquiry of the Edith-Russ-Haus into artistic revisitations of history and the uses of archival materials, both creative and subversive, to interrogate the present. A constellation of almost 20 projects by: Pia Arke & Anders Jørgensen, Petra Bauer, Matthew Buckingham, Kajsa Dahlberg, Michelle Dizon, Benj Gerdes, Andrea Geyer, Regina José Galindo, Jan Peter Hammer, Sven Johne, William E. Jones, Lasse Lau, Maha Maamoun, Robert Ochshorn, Rania Rafei & Raed Rafei, Benjamin Tiven, Sarah Vanagt & Katrien Vermeire, Raed Yassin and Akram Zaatari,  compel a public as both practical objects and allegorical encounters, particularly as they together invite one to consider the cultural production of meaning and knowledge. They call upon us not as recipients of history, but as agents of the future.

Info: Curators: Benj Gerdes & Lasse Lau. Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Katharinenstraße 23, Oldenburg, Duration 2/2-19/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.edith-russ-haus.de