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Havana's apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city's art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba's limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries - El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space - this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the 'worlding' of cultural institutions.
Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.
The reactivation of Rudi Fuchs' 1983 exhibition 'Summer Display' took place in 2009 as part of the collection series, 'Play van Abbe part 1: The Game and the Players', and was entitled 'Repetition: Summer Display 1983'. The reconstruction questioned the codes and systems used within (but also consciously and unconsciously outside) the museum and raised several questions, including: what story did the original composers want to tell, and how can this piece of history be understood today? Is the new presentation a separate exhibition entirely or a copy of the 'original' one? What is then the difference between the idea of copy, repetition, and reenactment? And what is the role of the museum's archive in the process of restaging? What can curatorial institutional archives tell us about the museum itself?