Referencing History

The exhibition ‘Referencing History’, curated by London based curator Jane Neal runs until July 15, 2012 at the Green Art Gallery. The exhibition features the work of Kamrooz Aram, Hale Tenger, and Ali Banisadr with a selection of some of the most internationally renowned Eastern European artists including Alexander Tinei, Daniel Pitin, Marius Bercea, Zsolt Bodoni, Ivan Grubanov, Ciprian Muresan, Mircea Suciu, and Serban Savu.

The artists brought together in this exhibition share an active interest in history, be that a collective or personal one. In several cases the artists share the experience of growing up under a restrictive regime and witnessing its disintegration, as was the case for those living through the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. In others, there is simply a fascination with historical processes and the systemic interpretations of “historical events”.

It can be argued that there is a system of historical information in place that is streamed to us regularly, but that system also selects ‘what’ information is transcribed to its audiences and ‘who’ it selects to speak for it. Is history as Avi Shlaim argues, simply “the propaganda of the victors”? The artists featured here, through their different oeuvres, essentially begin their work by questioning the processes from which history itself has been and is being created, interpreted and re-iterated. Antonio Gramsci in his “Prison Notebooks” made an astute observation on historical processes which was later re-visited by Edward Said in his seminal work “Orientalism”:

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which have deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”

For these selected artists the process of tracing the “inventory” begins to form through archives which are created through the organisation and accretion of information. But there is also an archaeological aspect to art making which recognises that any new creation is, in essence, simply an additional layer upon the remains of a deep and porous past.

In some of the work state and religious figures of authority, under various empires and regimes, often find themselves as the protagonists who are brought in to question the human tendency to put faith in a system that has proven itself to be fallible. In others, alternative readings of “factual events” in which personal memory and reality merge and blur simultaneously, force the viewer to re-consider that which they may hold as being incontestable. At a time when boundaries are being re-drawn, territories re-assessed and political and historical contexts are re-examined, the exhibition highlights the urgency for recognising instilled personal preconceptions and collective presuppositions.