Re-Enactment – Airlab 2012 Theme

The strategy of re-enactment is an artistic approach that one encounters often in contemporary art. The idea of re-enactment one can say permeates to a certain extent the artistic operation all along the history of art, but a shift in perspective occurs in contemporary art: events are re-enacted not for the mere sake of commemorance, but for the relevance of the past event for the current situation. Furthermore, we can encounter re-enactments of not only historical events, but also of art works and actions done by other artists in the past, or even artists re-enacting their own work or actions. Thus one can say that through reaching back to historical events that have left a trace, or to historical circumstances that inspired creation of certain art works, artistic re-enactment is a way to question our present times through direct engagement not only of the artists but often of the audience as well.
Even though artistic re-enactments don’t consist of mere repetition of events or actions, the element of repetition is present and plays an important role. It does so from a standpoint of a “theatrical” idea of history, as elaborated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, in which he considers repetition to form “a condition of movement under which something effectively new is produced in history.”
It is precisely this idea of Re-Enactment, this repetition with a difference that will produce something new that constitutes the focus of TICA AIRLAB for the year 2012. The residency program will host artists that are working along these lines, using re-enactment as their artistic strategy, willing to experiment with a context overlap, using the Albanian situation as an active background for the translation of their work.