LASSE LAU & BENJ GERDES: COLLECTIVE PRACTICES
Rewriting Histories talk with the two curators and exhibiting artists
The first event in connection to our new exhibition Rewriting Histories is happening on Sunday, 8th of November from 2pm to 4pm in Fotografisk Center (Bygning 55, Staldgade 16, 1699 Kbh. V.)
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” (Walter Benjamin ‘On the concept of History’)
Benj Gerdes and Lasse Lau have worked as individual artists and as part of art and political collectives. When working at the intersection of art and activism, the question is often how to effect change in the present. To generate better tools, groups frequently immerse themselves in oral histories and subcultural archives to reclaim past histories of resistance and struggle. What are the projects and conclusions that result from this “archival impulse?” In this presentation the artists, themselves collaborators on this exhibition and both members of Kran Film Collective, will discuss some common ground between their experience in groups and collectives, as well as the different approaches and relationships those groups have had to earlier political movements and actions.
Benj Gerdes (b. in 1978 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) lives in New York working as an artist, writer, and media arts professor. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination.
Lasse Lau (b. 1974 in Sønderborg, Denmark) lives in Copenhagen and New York, USA, working as a visual artist and filmmaker. His projects often function as a mediator and channel of crises and displacements that occur by frictions of reason in-between absolute, relative or relational spaces.
The exhibition Rewriting Histories is revisiting historical events and investigating what the reception of the past means for the understanding of the present. By retelling the history in a new way and from a present perspective are the artists of the exhibition pointing at the history as a – often ideological – construction.
Rewriting Histories is part of CPH:DOX program. FotoForum will be held in English.