Rewinding Internationalism
Press rewind and you go back to a part of a song or a scene in a film. Something happens in the act of rewinding though. The magnetic tape of a cassette or VHS gets scrambled. The section of the song, now replayed out of sequence, becomes abstracted. If you continuously rewind and replay–to borrow the title of Susan Pui San Lok’s new work in the exhibition–the recorded fragment takes on completely new meanings. Within the context of an exhibition that is in dialogue with the 1990s, the term ‘rewinding’ is an invitation to revisit and rethink histories and concepts once they have already been ‘played’ out–to scramble them and open them up to new interpretations.
‘Rewinding Internationalism’ unfolds across the galleries of the Van Abbemusuem’s Old Building through a series of scenes. These scenes invite visitors to visit the 1990s, a period when the construct of internationalism was in deep flux across both political and cultural contexts. Rather than represent a series of histories, however, works in the exhibition bring moments, places and people into dialogue. Visual and sonic associations allow evocations and implications to speak across the 1990s to the present moment, defined as it is by deepening and ongoing ecological and biopolitical crises.
The exhibition has been conceived and developed during a global time of pandemic when the idea of internationalism is again in deep flux–the closure of national borders, prolonged isolation and screen time have had profound effects on people’s sense of relating to one another, as well on how artists and cultural practitioners’ work. Works in the exhibition have been produced or adapted within these constraints. More than that, however, the exhibition’s fragmented rehearsals across space and time speak to the current sense of uncertainty, foreboding and repetition.
The 1990s serves as the departure point for the exhibition. During the decade, the ascendancy of globalisation and the proclaimed ‘End of History’ following the end of the Soviet Union, coincided with the deadly revival of ethno-nationalisms within Europe, for which the ‘international community’ were found badly wanting; internationalism as a political project gave way to what Didem Pekün terms ‘bureaucratic incompetence’ from supra-national bodies. Within the art system a ‘New Internationalism’ was embraced, calling for an end to the centring of Western European and US positions. Here internationalism became a stand in for a rethinking of white, Western hegemony, yet it remained conceptualised from the very position it sought to counter. At the same time, forms of cultural and political resistance to globalisation or rising nationalism offered inspiring examples of how internationalism might be rethought from highly situated, local contexts.
These shifting, often contradictory approaches to internationalism remain with us today. They appear in different guises throughout the exhibition from images of anti- globalisation protests in Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Teargas, the scripted rehearsal of politicians failing to avert disaster in Didem Pekun’s Disturbed Earth, the remixed archival material of the Gate foundation archive, an institution set up in the Netherlands in the late 1980s to present the work of art form south East Asia in Europe, or the collective happenings of Les Diables Bleus in Nice against the rise of the Front National.
At its best, the promise of internationalism serves as a counter to the divisions of nationalism or the homogenising effects of globalisation, and draws on a long history of transnational, collective solidarity foregrounding relations across people, ideas, places and histories. In this sense, the framing of the exhibition is a prompt to consider how we understand and relate to the prospect of internationalism today.
Rather than track a history of the decade, or offer a definitive outline of ‘internationalism’, the exhibition moves between–rewinds–different sites and scenes. The purpose here is not to offer a grand narrative or singular world view, but a series of microhistories, that tell different stories to the public.
The scenes visitors encounter will take them from the streets of Seattle during the anti-globalisation protests in Allan Sekula’s iconic Waiting for Teargas, loaned from MACBA, to the valleys of rural China and Betsy Damon’s extraordinary, collective project Keepers of the Waters, to the dance halls of Berlin in Tony Cokes’s thumping Microhaus or the Black Atlantic to the exhibition ‘Unity in Diversity in International Art. Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Movement’ in Jakarta in 1995.
The exhibition includes a number of collaborative research projects made with partners in Spain, Slovenia, Indonesia and Chile. Emerging out of conversations within the European museum confederation L’Internationale, the research projects focus on a series of microhistories. Methodologically, these collaborations mobilise an international network within the construction of the exhibition itself, whilst also weaving together disparate though related stories.