The strategy of re-enactment is an artistic approach 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: past events are re-enacted not for the mere sake of commemoration, but due to their relevance to the current situation. Furthermore, one can encounter not only re-enactments of historical events, but also of artworks and actions done by other artists in the past, or even artists re-enacting their own works or actions. Thus, it could be said that by reaching back to historical events that have left a trace, or, to historical circumstances that have inspired the creation of certain artworks, artistic re-enactment is a way to question our present times through the direct engagement of not only the artist, but often of the audience as well. 

Even though artistic re-enactments do not 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 produces something new through time — that constituted the focus of TICA AIR LAB for the year 2012. The residency program hosted artists working along these lines of re-enactment as an artistic strategy and that were willing to experiment with a context overlap, using the Albanian situation as an active background for the translation of their works. 

Edi Muka, Tirana/Göteborg

Curated by Sonja Lau
Residency catalogue, Tirana, 2013 
English

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