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Not Quite How I Remember It

This international group exhibition responded to prevalent re-enactments and re-constructions in contemporary art. Exploring why artists take a paradoxically labour-intensive approach to remaking events, objects and artworks, it posited the body as a vehicle through which cultural data is processed and revitalised.

The research for this exhibition explored the notion that the present moment contains the seeds of alternative futures, influenced by Chantal Mouffe’s assertion in The Political as Antagonism that ‘there are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated.’ Drucilla Cornell’s insistence on the tense of the future anterior in which our political struggles ‘will have been accomplished’ as key to feminist temporality was a key research theme, as was Elisabeth Freeman’s concept of temporal drag, which reignites the unfulfilled potential of seemingly outmoded tropes. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s observation of how obsolete technology ‘makes time appear,’ the exhibition intended to evoke a sense of layered time to suggest how historical eras are memorialized and stereotyped.

The research process led to new commissions including Nestor Kruger’s Oblivion, Diane Borsato’s video ‘domesticating’ performances by Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys and Bonnie Sherk, and two participatory works by Lee Walton involving gallery attendants and members of the public. The installations included Gerard Byrne’s 1984 and beyond, based on a 1973 Playboy conversation where science fiction writers speculate on the future; Felix Gmelin’s Tools and Grammar, drawing from pre-Nazi era film of an enlightened German school for blind children; Michael Stevenson’s reconstructed Guatemalan MONIAC, an economic predictor which once heralded prosperity for poor nations; and Nancy Davenport’s photographs of the university campus sites of 1968 protests. Across from Mary Kelly’s Flashing Nipple Redux, a light box figuring a restaged 1970 anti-Miss World protest, and two works by Sharon Hayes explored how radical actions are remembered and misremembered.