Art

The staging of the Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, a mass action dramatizing key moments of the October Revolution and created by a collective of artists under the direction of Russian director Nikolai Evreinov in 1920 , is often mentioned as one of the first examples of artistic reenactment. As a recent study has shown ( Arns et al., 2017 ), the Storming of the Winter Palace deceptively fit the category of reenactment. Yet, it provides a starting point for the genealogy of a practice that has gained prominence in modern and contemporary art over the past decades, up to the recent boom in the 1990s and 2000s, when reenactment featured centrally in a number of exhibitions and conferences. Among them, projects such as Life, Once More (2005), Experience, Memory, Reenactment (2005), and History Will Repeat Itself (2007) provide a basis for the conceptualization of this cultural phenomenon. Art theorists and curators emphasize the diversity of stories, media, methods, and results in artistic reenactment at the turn of the century. Far from seeing it as a new genre, a movement or a mode, they consider it as part of a long history, “an element within a wider cultural field, which incorporates the copy in its manifold manifestations” (Rushton, 2005, p. 7). Moreover, they point out the similarities between reenactment in art and in other domains, such as criminology (forensic architecture), experimental archaeology, and living history.