The old revisits the new

The things of the past are never viewed in their true perspective or receive their just value; but value and perspective change with the individual or the nation that is looking back on its past

Friedrich Nietzsche

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

Catherine Bertola - Unseen by all but me alone, Gold thread, 2009

Catherine Bertola - Unseen by all but me alone, Gold thread, 2009

Catherine Bertola – detail of Unseen by all but me alone

Catherine Bertola

After the fact, 2006. Found dust and soundSweeping it Under, 1999. Collected household dust, PVA glue and vacuum cleaner

Mark Dion

Polar Bears and Toucans (from Amazonas to Svalbard), 1991 Providence Cabinet, 2001

Mark Dion’s Wunderkammer

Mark Dion The Curiosity Shop, 2005installation views

Elaine Wilson - Fleurs du mal series, 2009

Elaine Wilson - Don’t Touch!! , 2008

Thomson & Craighead – Obituary, 2004

http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/obit.html

Susan Collins – The Spectrascope, 2004

Matt Stokes – The Gainsborough Packet

Vicki Bennett a.k.a People like us

://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ferUvQINBi8&feature=related

Peter McGough and David McDermott

Historical Re-enactments

• Artistic re-enactments are not performative re-stagings of historic situations and events

• They question the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory

• Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.

Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy - Greenwich Degree Zero (2006)

http://www.gmfilm.co.uk/greenwich.html

Kerry Tribe - Here & Elsewhere, 2002Video installation, two-channel, 10:30 min.,

synchronized

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZoGsZcJgw

Old/new themed exhibitions

• Private View at the Bowes Museum. May 4-28 July 1996

• History Will Repeat Itself – HMKV, Dortmund, Germany. June 9 - September 23, 2007

• Picture House - Film, Art and Design - Belsay Hall. May 5-September 30 2007

Picture House at Belsay

Geraldine Pilgrim

Working Bibliography