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Can reenactments be a way to create counter-narratives in and for the museum? Through the analysis of political performance (or what the artist Tania Bruguera calls 'political-timing-specific' artworks), this essay discusses the potential of reenactment as both a practice of materializing memories and narratives of oppression and of rethinking museum policies in terms of preservation and display. Its main argument is that, while the archive can be regarded as a form of materializing the memory of these works, reenactment is more than a way of recovering the past; it is also a device for reconstructing memories of activism and oppression. This essay further suggests that reenactments of political-timing-specific works demand a change in accessioning, conservation, and presentation practices, which might be inclined to erase decentralized art-historical and material narratives.
The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj's sound piece "Starry Night". Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs, the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified: the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence, and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj's subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou's elaboration of the concept of the subject as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.