This series of lectures and screenings explored the contested terrains of experience and memory. Situated on the intersection between our personal lives and collective culture, experience and memory involve both the individual and the social body. On the one hand a wide range of contemporary practices in art, history and anthropology have recently attempted to create place for individual voices and histories. On the other hand recent cultural theories have emphasized how experience and memory are culturally constructed rather than foundational or unmediated levels of human existence. Experience, Memory, Re-enactment aimed to problematise both positions.

The contributors to this series are fully aware that experience and memory are culturally mediated, yet at the same time they acknowledge that this insight does not offer any instant relief. The lectures and screenings showed how artists employ performances, actions and re-enactments as strategies for exploring how experience and memory are simultaneously culturally constructed and personally lived, and thus charged with desires, hopes and fears as well as political ideologies. Their performances and re-enactments take playful and parodying forms, but they often also literally or metaphorically put the individual body at a painful risk. They thus recall in the viewer the impossibility of taking a distance and of distinguishing between emotional response and analytical reflection, which is so characteristic for the contested terrains of memory and experience.

February 5, 2004
screening of PETER WATKINS: PUNISHMENT PARK (1970)
with an introduction by Steve Rushton

The films of Peter Watkins blur the documentary and the imagined, either projecting into a speculative future or onto a hypothetical present. Punishment Park (1970) follows a "what if" scenario, asking what if a state of national emergency was declared in the United States? In a desert of South-Western California, Group 637, who have been judged as "subversives" by the authorities, find themselves in Bear Mountain National Park in lieu of a prison sentence. Here they discover the rules of the "game" they are forced to play.

Deimantas Narkevicius, The Role of a Lifetime, film still, 2003

February 12, 2004
lecture by DEIMANTAS NARKEVICIUS

Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius presented his films His-story (1998), Energy Lithuania (2000) and The Role of a Lifetime (2003) (with and about Peter Watkins), and talked about his interest in history, memory, recollection and reconstruction. Through such means as the use of historical visual techniques and the separation of voice and image, his films challenge the claim to truthfulness of the documentary genre of historiography.

February 19, 2004
presentation & lecture by ROD DICKINSON & STEVE RUSHTON: THE MILGRAM RE-ENACTMENT (2002)
with a special screening of PIERRE HUYGHE: THE THIRD MEMORY (2000)

Rod Dickinson in collaboration with Steve Rushton, The Milgram Re-enactment, video still, 2002

The Milgram Re-enactment (2002) is an authentic reconstruction of one part of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiment which was conducted at Yale University from 1960. During the original experiment subjects were asked to give seemingly real electric shocks to another individual. The experiment was designed to test the limit to which subjects were prepared to follow the orders of a scientist.
Artist Rod Dickinson has made a series of re-enactments that examine the relationship between belief systems and social control, including The Jonestown Re-enactment (2000) and The Waco Re-enactment (2004). Steve Rushton is a writer and filmmaker, with a special interest in belief, paranoia, and their reality effects.

In addition to The Milgram Re-enactment and related works, Pierre Huyghe's The Third Memory (2000) was shown. "In 1972 a bank robbery was committed by John Woytowicz; three years later the crime became the subject of Sidney Lumet's film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell the story. Using a two-channel video projection, a television interview, and posters, Huyghe builds from a "first memory" of the original crime to a "second memory" with the film's recreation of that crime, to arrive at a "third memory," a rich blurring of the documented and the imagined." (Source: University of Virginia Art Museum)

February 26, 2004
performance: RODDY HUNTER: REMOVE/PLACE: Waiting for Sunrise in Tian'anmen Square

The work of Roddy Hunter concerns the production of urban space, addressing its social, political, economic, ethnographic and ideological implications. The work debates the extent to which authorities and agencies construct urban space to encourage desires peculiar and amenable to their political and economic interests. Recently, his interest has turned to the dystopian function of urban mythology. For 'Experience, Memory, Re-enactment’, Hunter explored this area of discontinuity of urban time and space through partially embodying an experience he has never had: waiting for sunrise in Tian'anmen Square. Tian'anmen Square is approximately 880 meters from north to south and 500 meters from east to west. He reduced the the square by proportion so that fitted inside the auditorium of TENT. On February 27, the sun arose on Tian'anmen Square at 06:52. The performance in Rotterdam concluded at this same moment: 23:52 CET, February 26.

March 11, 2004
screening SLANTED REALITIES, curated by Florian Wuest

Slanted Realities was a video programme about the complications and contradictions within social relationships. Focusing on the notion of the nuclear family, the selected videos examined how cultural codes, political ideologies and gender stereotypes leave an imprint on our daily lives in small and large ways. These works combine critical analysis with undisguised irony and black humor, and employ performance and theatrical enactment. Slanted Realities also featured a 1950 social guidance film meant to teach American children the accurate manners for the family dinner table.

with the following works:
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Me/We (1993)
Edward C. Simmel, A Date With Your Family (1950)
Martha Rosler, Losing: A Conversation With The Parents (1977)
Tony Oursler/Sonic Youth, Tunic (Song for Karen) (1990)
Alix Pearlstein, Partners (1998)
John Wood/Paul Harrison, Board (1993)
Harald Thys/Jos de Gruyter, De Pot (2001)

March 25, 2004
screening: TESTIMONIEScurated by Florian Wuest

Testimonies presented two experimental documentary films in which the mothers of the two filmmakers recount their personal experiences of Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the Holocaust. The filmmakers search to learn about the fragile memories of a person close to them, while reflecting simultaneously on the larger social-historical context of one of the most devasting periods of the 20th century.

Abraham Ravett, The March (1999)
"To date, I've made six films which reflect on how the Holocaust affected my parents, our evolving relationship, and my own psychological and emotional response to their experiences. The March continues this cinematic exploration by detailing one woman's recollections of that experience. It also serves as a meditation on time elapsed and the fragility of personal memory. Utilizing a series of recorded film interviews conducted with my mother over the period of 13 years (1984-1997), I ask the following question each time: "Mom, what do you remember about the March?" The complexity of her responses, the visible emotional toll experienced with each reply, and the ensuing portrait of her aging process, form the core of this film." (Abraham Ravett)

Su Friedrich, The Ties that Bind (1984)
Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, the filmmaker's mother describes the rise of Nazism, the war, and the occupation of Germany during which she met her future husband, an American soldier. The only voice we hear is that of this "ordinary woman", while the images portray her current life in Chicago, her hometown before and during the war, contemporary peace marches and present day footage of Germany. Friedrich's film technique creates a dialogue between the images and the soundtrack, between a personal quest and a larger historical context.

April 1, 2004
screening: KEVIN BROWNLOW & ANDREW MOLLO: IT HAPPENED HERE (1966)

What if Nazi troops had conquered England in 1940? From this premise, British film historian Kevin Brownlow and military expert and costume designer Andrew Mollo, present an alternative history. The film is a historical fiction narrated with minute documentary credibility, staged through fictional newsreel sequences, painstaking period reconstructions and the casting of actual British fascists in the role of Nazi collaborators. The story follows a nurse, Pauline Murray, as her attempts to avoid involvement and maintain an apolitical stance get frustrated by the impossibility of remaining outside the mechanisms of repression and collaboration that pervade Nazi England. Keeping a documentary distance, the film refuses to condone the disturbing attitudes it presents. It Happened Here shocked the British audiences when it came out in 1966. It shattered the illusion of moral superiority that was central to the canonical version of history “as it really happened”.

April 8, 2004
screening: CHRIS MARKER: SANS SOLEIL (1982)

A female narrator reads letters of fictional character Sandor Krasna, a traveling cameraman. Touring past Tokyo, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco, the film weaves together a tapestry of memories of variously located cultures and viewpoints. Sans Soleil explores the relationship between personal memory, collective history and technologies of recording; between what Gilles Deleuze has called “the present that passes” and the “past that is preserved”. Marker asks how people remembered before they filmed and photographed, but he acknowledges at the same time that the past that is preserved is also problematic. Our filmic and photographic images compete with our recollection images – our memories of events that are not recorded. Television, cinema and other “public” images comprise a sort of official history, which shapes a culture’s collective dreams and collective identity. Marker: “We do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten.” (source: Laura Marks: The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil)

April 15, 2004
lecture: KENDELL GEERS: TERRO-REALISM

"Imagine an artist who has been influenced by the strategies of the freedom fighter, the passion of the terrorist, the Realism of lived experience, the perversity and free expression of Surrealism, the politics of the Realists, the eye for details of the Hyper-Realists, the experience of the ghetto, the pain of being disenfranchised and thus is borne the TerroRealist. They are united by what divides them more than anything else. They are united only inasmuch as they share a common disillusionment with the promise of the grand narratives of Democracy, Nation, Equality, God, Truth, Art, Justice, and even History." (Kendell Geers, The Work of Art in the State of Exile, 2003)

April 22, 2004
screening & talk: MATT MULLICAN: HYPNOSIS

What is reality, and how do we inhabit it? Matt Mullican’s work has been described as “an elaborate attempt to duplicate externally the vast complex of inner representations which add up to his understanding of the world he lives in.” (Allan McCollum) His Hypnosis performances (held from 1978-82 and from 1992-present) can be seen as a radical demonstration of this principle. To be put under hypnosis is a strategy to suspend the structuring and censoring function of consciousness and submerge himself into the unconscious mind, the storehouse of experiences, memories, beliefs and projections with which we construct the world we live in and maintain its stability. Under hypnosis, Mullican is made to believe what he imagines. Does he leave reality in the process? When he lets himself be transported back to his childhood, or forward into an imagined old age, Mullican is on the one hand still present in the “real” room he shares with his audience, yet simultaneously he has entered an imaginary space. Though seemingly detached from this imaginary space, the audience is forced to go along and witness how a lived reality is constructed, wondering (and worried) how “real” Mullican’s imagined experiences are for him.

April 29, 2004
screening: ECSTATIC BODIES, curated by Florian Wuest

Ecstatic Bodies expands on the idea of the human body as a hybrid between natural disposition and cultural simulation, social condition and self-determined enactment. A reflection on the performativity of the body necessarily embraces the eccentric world of sensations and expressions. The desire to transgress the outer limits of physical experience and perception fuels collective imaginaries and the fear of the body as a register of pain, disfigurement and catastrophe. Ecstatic Bodies is a partly rearranged version of a programme for the Independent Film Show 3rd Edition, E-M Arts/Fondazione Morra, Napels (2003).

with the following works:
Takahiko limura, Ai (Love) (1962)
Paul Sharits, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968)
Kathrin Resetarits, Agypten (1997)
Sharon Lockhart, Khalil, Shaun, A Woman under the Influence (1994)
Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Rest Energy (1980)
Günther Brus, Zerreissprobe (1970)
John Smith, Om (1986)

Mathilde ter Heijne, Fuck Patriarchy!, video still, 2004

May 6, 2004
screening & talk by MATHILDE TER HEIJNE

Mathilde ter Heijne employs the empathetic potential in video and digital media in order to approach the emotional states of people under extreme circumstances. Self-sacrifice and self-destruction, for personal and political reasons, have been the central theme of her work since long before 9-11. Her works take the viewer very close to the emotional state of self-immolators, and the radical consequences of love, hope, despair, idealism, war. Mixing documentary and fictional imagery, and referring to news media as well as the genre of the tragedy, Ter Heijne places herself and her audience amidst the turmoil of unstable realities. Compassion, irony, and horror compete, perhaps in vain, as ways to come to terms with extreme states of mind and extreme actions against the individual and the social body.

May 13, 2004
screening & talk: MATTHEW BUCKINGHAM: A SENSE OF THE PAST

Matthew Buckingham utilizes photography, film, video and audio to question the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. Often beginning with a seemingly quotidian overlooked artifact or story from the past, Buckingham investigates its connections to the present while scrutinizing the representational powers and effects of images and narration. For the viewer this genealogy unfolds physically within the spatial and social context where the work is encountered.