PAST

In the Beginning: Media Art and History is a thematic online exhibition that explores how video, sound, and performance artists use new technologies and formats to imagine history now. From its start, time-based media art has embraced liveness, immediacy, and a propulsive drive toward the future. But these forces coexist with a countervailing desire to approach the past—to mine it for material to remix and recode, to challenge traditional narratives, or to investigate how stories are remembered or forgotten. The artists in this series exhibit this simultaneous pull toward past and present, asking a series of vital questions: How do today’s tools and technologies make history available in new ways? What does our relationship to historical events say about our present? And how can we live with history without living in the past?

The series unfolds over three chapters. The first features video and sound works that incorporate found footage and archival material to approach the past in new ways. The second highlights performance-based works that transcend reenactment to imagine how we represent the past through live action. The final chapter centers on videos that use hand-drawn animation or computer-generated imagery to reflect on the modes through which history is constructed.

Participating Artists: Camille Henrot, Jennie C. Jones, Mark Leckey, Cyprien Gaillard, Kiyan Williams, Rainer Ganahl, CT Jasper and Joanna Malinowska, Dana Awartani, Héctor Zamora, Kota Ezawa, William Kentridge, Terence Gower and Sondra Perry.