History Will Repeat Itself
Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art
Sigalit Landau The Dining Hall
Opening:
November 17, 2007, 5 – 9 pm
Dates:
November 18, 2007 – January 13, 2008
Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art
Participating artists include: Guy Ben-Ner, Walter Benjamin, Irina Botea, C-Level, Daniela Comani, Jeremy Deller, Rod Dickinson, Nikolai Evreinov, Omer Fast, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Heike Gallmeier, Felix Gmelin, Pierre Huyghe, Evil Knievel, Korpys/Loeffler, Robert Longo, Tom McCarthy, Frédéric Moser / Philippe Schwinger, Collier Schorr, Tabea Sternberg, Kerry Tribe, T. R. Uthco & Ant Farm, Artur Zmijewski.
Concept: Inke Arns (HMKV Dortmund)
Curators: Gabriele Horn (KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin), Inke Arns (HMKV Dortmund)
Co-Curator: Katharina Fichtner
The exhibition History Will Repeat Itself focuses on current strategies of re-enactment in contemporary art and performance, and presents the positions of 22 international artists. Re-enactments have become more and more popular in recent years. The re-creation of historical battles or important events seem to exert a fascination particularly because they provide the opportunity to gain a different entry into history by re-experiencing it. In contemporary art there has been an increasing number of artistic re-enactments. Unlike popular historical re-enactments, artistic re-enactments do not simply affirm what has happened in the past, but question the present by taking recourse to historical (often traumatic) events that have left their traces in collective memory. Because history and memory are seldom directly experienced but more often mediated through media, re-enactments also represent an artistic interrogation of media images. They try to scrutinize the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory. A comprehensive catalogue with texts by Inke Arns, Katharina Fichtner, Gabriele Horn, Tom McCarthy and others is available.
History Will Repeat Itself is a co-operation between Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
The exhibition History Will Repeat Itself is funded by:
Kulturstiftung des Bundes / German Federal Cultural Foundation
Kunststiftung NRW
Der Ministerpräsident des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen
Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund
PHOENIX
dortmund-project
Bundesamt für Kultur BAK (Switzerland)
NRW Kultursekretariat Wuppertal
The Henry Moore Foundation
Pro Helvetia
Bureau des Arts Plastiques/Culturesfrance — French Embassy
The British Council
Medion
Sigalit Landau The Dining Hall
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the The Dining Hall, a new and site-specific installation by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau, in its main hall. Ten years after participating in Documenta X, this is her first large solo exhibition in Germany. Landau’s works relate to her Jewish identity, centering on questions of place and borders, foreignness and migration, individual and collective, reality and utopia. Using highly diverse techniques, she combines sculpture, installation, video, and performance at different formal and narrative levels. In her new work for The Dining Hall, Landau focuses on food and feeding places, alchemy, and the preparation of food, which she discusses as a frictional condition of survival while also taking into account the bitter taste these themes have in times of global capitalism. Sigalit Landau integrates historic aspects into her site-specific project, where lack and abundance, community and the individual, periphery and center, East and West, as well as past and present meet.
A catalogue of the past ten years of projects by Sigalit Landau will be available from January 2008.
Curator: Gabriele Horn
The project The Dining Hall is funded by:
Kulturstiftung des Bundes / German Federal Cultural Foundation
Embassy of Israel in Berlin
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart
Lily Elstein — MusicArt Ltd. — International Center for Music and Art, Zichron Yaacov/Israel
FC (Flying-Cargo) International Transportation Ltd., Lod/Israel
Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., Haifa/Israel
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
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Phone 0049 [30] 2434 59 0
Fax 0049 [30] 2434 59 99
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